The Amazing Muses’ Amusing Mazes

When painters who paint about painting
meet writers who write about writing,
self-conscious redundancy
bordering lunacy
ends in esthetic in-fighting.

Such modernists, right about nothing
(mostly nihilists mad about something)
are so lost in the process
they vent all their excess
in metacognition:  dull writing.

You poets who muse about musing –
unaware you are reader-abusing,
provide a terrific
verbose soporific
yet not of the reader’s own choosing…

I long for some sheer virtuosity –
but I’m stifled by all the pomposity.
This dull erudition,
(sub-metacognition),
is purely artistic atrocity.

You thinkers who think about thinking
drag my spirit far lower than sinking.
What we want is a Word
which we haven’t yet heard –
so ’till then I’ll just drink about drinking.

Disabused of Muses

 

Poetry, you dazzled my eye
teased me with unearthly visions;
got me too high.

Primed my soul to fly to heaven
then marooned me upon the earth
sixed for seven.

You called across celestial shores
glowing in empyrean colors
then shut your doors.

Lost in your amusing mazes
I followed fast your golden thread
through dark phases.

Muse-abused and undelivered
my heartstrings wavered, stalled, then stopped –
arrows quivered.

Poetry – you’ve cheated on me;
winked and flirted, then escorted
Philosophy!

Spare me further cantos, curses,
keep your holy delirium,
unhinged verses…

On second thought, oh Lady cruel –
humiliate me – lead me on.
(I’m still your fool.)

Dominatrix, queen of the word
for you I’ll suffer untold shame.
I’m undeterred.

RoxyMuse1

IMAGE CREDIT: 3bp.blogspot.com 
[Roxy Music album cover: For Your Pleasure 1973]

Deleuzional

In 1984 I sat in on a philosophy class at the University of St. Denis in Paris.
Gilles Deleuze was quite a figure, hunched at a desk in the center of the crowded room with his shaggy mane of hair and his long uncut scary-looking fingernails. He was surrounded by a multitude of disciples and mini-cassette recorders spread out on the desk in front of him. I did not realize until recently that he exited this terrestrial globe by throwing himself off of a building. I decided to compose a belated elegy to this grand philosopher which you may read below. There is also mention of Guy Debord (whose philosophy inspired Malcolm McLaren among others).

 
 
A schiz-flow elegy for Gilles Deleuze

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit,
according to the tradition of men,
according to the basic principles of the world,
and not according to Christ
Colossians 2:4-8 (NKJV)

His Nietzschean trip moved from Comic to Tragic:
Deleuze’s delusions flew out the fenêtre.
Airborne and stoned on philosophy’s magic
(the nihilist suicide’s raison d’être),
Propelled from the window, transcending the Ontic,
his organless body in textual flight;
a schiz-flow beyond on a voyage turned frantic.
His thought, a nomadic adornment for speed,
multiplicitly viewing a thousand plateaux
was a force for unhinging the doorways of light
and a plea for postmodern decoding indeed.
His frame soon encountered pure striated space
in the form of the pavement caressing his face.

He joins other smokers of Gallic tabac,
other esotericians of cognitive frenzy
(those mullahs of madness, those sultans of Whack)
Sorely missed by his victims, disciples and friends
he is mourned, misinterpreted, copied, dismissed . . .
(but for semioticians he heads up the list).

Another brave Frenchman, some guy named Debord
a bespectacled Marxist who missed all the marks
made the medium’s message a radical bore
dialectically fading the lights into darks.
Indirectly disrupting pop-culture with Punk
and other anarchic phenomena-junk,
he too chose to leave with a nihilist bang—
while we whimper and suffer down here with the gang.
The old situationist’s last situation:
an agit-prop funeral short on elation.

So to French de-constructor-philosopher-ravers
and all who rejoice while society wavers
I offer these lines, like a quick coup-de-grace
and be warned—they’re now viewing the Good Lord en face.

IMAGE CREDIT: webdeleuze.com

Hung on a Psychosociolinguistic Scaffold

Babel Tower

Oh Language, where hast thou hid thyself?
Thy once-bright spires decline to dust.
The calm, well-reasoned flow of wisdom
a bygone memory. I’ll not trust
these tween-to-twenty-something’s prattle;
endless babble of self-absorption
centered in pleasure-maximizing:
narcissistic thought-abortion.
Dude – they’re SO not app’ed for language
used by dad ten years ago.
I’m totally DONE with their, like, verbiage
They’re all: Smartphone Teenage Show.
It’s just, like, TALKING  – without words
in language ghettos; texting proud…
Their lack of precision offends my brain –
They ought to be ashamed (out loud).

Vygotsky’s vaunted Z.P.D,
and Bakhtin’s heteroglossic crack
along with Roland Barthe’s pet parrot
Are SO like totally talking smack.