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It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses.
—Althusser
I am so comfortable here. Yes.
Scalp, knee, / shoulder,
elbow, eye, nose,
tongue, finger,
breast, toe, / hand,
knuckle.
Names
of body parts.
We have turned them
into
verbs.
They could not
have
begun
as
verbs.
In the hypothesis
of the corporeal
the ontological
trumps
the kinetic. Yes.
I am so comfortable.
Here. Now. Failure, mortality,
memory, loss,
self-satire,
mutability.
Body
craves photograph.
After Josephus splotched saffron
across the interdunal swales,
the hydrothermal goons fructified,
smothering the send-up
at last, o so rococo, shorn / of the slipshod slothful.
Shrewdly, Josephus nosed down. He
jostled.
Chomp chomp chomp. The chump trilled
aggregate rhyme, corroborating the collaborative
compromises percussive / of all, all the sated post-apocalyptic
apocryphals,
sticky but filched and o so swank.
Monoliths in a cloud of dust.
In the darkness she told us that we must learn to
weather scarcity.
Ruby red rose hips bequeathed
delusion upon jouissance.
Mawkish, labile, the lapidary
leopard paws the defoliated / shades
of Josephus’s craven paparazzi.
Grill them, says Josephus.
Pop their suffocating platitudes
and sullen ressentiment like the curdled pus
of a ripe pimple. O levity procrastinated!
So rancorous. So petulant. To
Josephus’s jaded lassitude, they’re all poseurs.
Truth: the facile
tyranny
of facility
must interpellate
the poem
into
t h e
d-d-demagoguery
of
lingu*istic faux
tran*sparency!
as surely as Mussolini’s nose
directs his toes across the polished dance floor.
In these guises of the fallow plains
when we eye
each other not least
we do not see when we say
what / we do not see that we only see
or / that we only / see our own disguises.
our own disguises.
My maid is so dull-witted that she / brings me plum blossoms
for my hair.
Mussolini is dead!
Josephus shoulders his way
through the crowds.
Dark clouds boil
in the western skies.
When he lies
down to sleep,
this is the part
of the day
he will remember (remember, remember).