As they walked, they held each other by their two pinkies, curved in the form of hooks. Bang bang Citalopram. And the walk is a peaceful freeze full of heart-shaped fungi in tutu with dayglo, tongue stapled to the roof of the window inserts its kiss like a match gone out. I am where you are is. A white dolphin has been shoved in the pipes, in a parcel found on the underside of a spasming. What has tilt? That messes me up! Put mustard on the tortoise; try reading TRISM then dozing off. I was fixing to sing a poem about the multiverse so green, the stars just fanning away from each other — I couldn't hack it. After two minutes silence, you climb off the stage. Mutterings rise from the crowd, small at first, then louder, louder with outrage and discontent. I failed them, you think – I didn't do the one thing a poet could. In the next instant, though, it comes to you: the sweaty shame-filled silence you performed for those two minutes was in fact the right and only thing to say. It was the correct response, and yet they were right to be angry: rightly, you failed them, and they had the right to tear you to pieces. This is another thing a poet can do. It’s thrilling. Myth: when Eurydice dies, for a long time Orpheus refuses to play and sing. Fact: the opera singer Marian Anderson, who married a man named Orpheus, refused to sing for segregated audiences. I always feel the world’s about to end, that’s what W. likes about me, he says. I always think I’m going to be found out and shot. The biologists grow bored with the wild and want to study the angelic. The astronomers won’t trade their telescopes for microscopes, but the anthropologists are bored too, bored with Grace’s lunchbox and the way she doesn’t react to the dolls they throw into her room while she studies. They are happy to give up Grace if it means they can cancel their subscriptions to Tiger Beat, and so the biologists trade them gorillas who were growing suspicious anyway. Grace spots the biologists lurking in the bushes when she leaves for school. They army crawl across the grass as she walks to the bus stop. While she waits, the biologists hop over fences and pretend to be dogs, dogs that bark out field observations about her height and weight and whether or not her new haircut looks good. It’s not just some biologists. It’s all the biologists. “There were ants in the hearse!”, exclaimed the union delegate. “Oh, you, that’s enough, go and tell that to your flocks!” “I even wonder if there will be a few fine days for us”, murmurs the Prime Minister sitting in his bathtub, contemplating his little celluloid boats. “Those eyes undress you! Justice is done!”, yells another delegate. “I accuse!” grunts the doorman visibly drunk. The CEO continues … “Calm down, Gentlemen, calm down … popstars are committing grave errors, they confuse the mud of abundance with the gold of time … those new myths, uh, for better or worse, hey we have our own fantasies, don’t we? … I’ve seen Jose Canseco play baseball. I own a Jose Canseco coffee mug. Sometimes my pee smells like Cheerios.” Consider in this light what Derrida says in Aporias: “In order to be responsible and truly decisive, a decision should not limit itself to putting into operation a determinable or determining knowledge, the consequence of some pre-established order. … One must avoid good conscience at all costs.”
[Note: Sources: Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers (tr. Bernard Frechtman); Marianne Morris, “Commitment: An Ode”, “Nepotism is for Careful Fuckheads”, “Art Will Save Your Life”, “Aquatic Mammal Poem”, in Commitment; Posie Rider, “(folk)”, “Water is Cooler!”, in City Break Weekend Songs; Colleen Hind & Pocahontas Mildew, “Trigger Warning”, in We Are Real: A History; phaneronoemikon, “The Nurburgring”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 22 Aug 012; JBR (TRISM is by Rebecca Loudon); Ana Božičević, “Buffet of Air”, “J’ACCUSE / I REFUSE”, at Poetry Society of America; Lars Iyer, Spurious; Adam Peterson, “Biologists Study Grace”, at Paper Darts; Claude Pélieu: Kali Yug Express (tr. Mary Beach), at Nomadics, 30 Aug 012; John Sakkis, “I’ve seen Jose Canseco …”, at Both Both, 22 Aug 012; Avital Ronell, and Jacques Derrida, as quoted in Ronell’s The Test Drive]
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