The problem with epiphanies
Is they wear off.
By definition
Their magic
Must dissipate.
The overwhelming delight
Of understanding
Eventually gives way
To the dull thrum of living.
And you wonder
Is it better to know
The epiphany’s fleeting ecstasy
Knowing the hollowness
Once it’s gone?
Or is it better
To live in ignorance
Of that which
Now evades you?
A communist philosopher storms into
A psychoanalyst’s conference…
Have you heard this one?
He storms in
Claiming divine right
And claims it is
The analysand
Not the psychoanalyst
Who is the proletarian –
The worker –
Of psychoanalysis
He says
The brain is a factory
And we its workers
And it’s the psychoanalyst
Who is the boss
He says we must democratize
The process
He says
The workers of the world
Must own the means of cognition
Althusser looks to Lacan
Expecting the latter to agree.
He says nothing.
Althusser is rushed out of the building.
I, 15 years elder the century, weathered the broke-brawned shelter of millennia.
The diamond dust which glistened the middle 20th, now micro-incisions the skin and teeth, makes rags of lungs.
Colonial, they say we were better. But now post, we look at the masses, zombie-tired, broodbloods’ eternal shuffle.
Nostalgia for sickly things permeates to a time when future existed. Rotary phones and VHS grain stipple YouTube longings.
Feast! Feast! Ye hungry eye. Ye huddled mass! Yearning for 30 day free trials!
The end of history came too soon.
The cat investigates the phonograph
She can’t decide if she likes Mozart
Sniffs at the rotating record
I am reading Kenneth Rexroth
And marveling at his detail
He remembers everything that happens
At his imaginary parties
And like most poets
Talks of poplars
there was a period of time
When all my friends wrote
About poplars
I would say
“You live in Texas.
There aren’t any fucking poplars here.”
But they thought it sounded literary
And indeed it is the most literary tree
I shoo the cat away from the phonograph
She meows in disapproval
I tell her she can deal with it
A poem about boiled eggs
What strange alchemy happens in those boiling shells that renders the soft soup of embryo to a hardened jelly?
Any scientist who claims to know this process is a liar and a con artist.
The mysteries contained within the walls of that brittle housing aren’t meant for our understanding.
If a human were to grasp the mechanisms of a boiling egg, they would immediately reach Nirvana and transcend the material plane.
I keep my boiled eggs in a plastic bag, moistened by steamy condensation from the cooking process.
That way the eggs feel at home.
It’s like they never left the shell.
I take all the broken shells from years back and construct a great and beautiful man-sized shell.
I incubate my dreams in the shell.
That’s where I live.
The best piece of advice
I can give
to young poets
is
write like you hate
your audience
because you are never
going to find your voice
if you’re trying to please
other people
