SECTION
THIRTEEN
POETRY PAGE ONE
sm
COLUMN
SIXTY-NINE, MARCH 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
(Photo by Myles Aronowitz)
(Copyright © 1997 Myles Aronowitz)
[This poem originally appeared in THE FIRST OF THE MONTH, a newspaper of the Radical Imagination http:www.firstofthemonth.org.]
THE ACADEMIC COWARDS OF REACTION
(Copyright © 2001 Amiri Baraka)
Criss
cross the jism & the jasm. They do not
Want
to be fount out
So
they sigh and lie and criminalize silence
With
the dead pants of shaking in their boots. They
Are
afraid of the just gone and don't want to
Return,
cause they didn't know what to do
When
everybody was so animated and fly.
They
thought, after all, you can understand
Hiding
under the piano, looking for a Victrola
Or
a Defeatrola, you see, that-there was too fast
A
thing happening, and the Chinee screaming
"Revolution
Is The Main Trend". And that
rhythm
effected
the jungle bunnies with no papers
and
motley whites who went along with the
Everything
stuff. And we know, the devil who
is
provost
of my heart, and I, we nose grows. We
rose
to
say, ok, I don't know how to be angry, but I can be
profound
as a hammock in the good room. You
see
we
got a degree in degreeing and a Ph.D in Ph.Ding.
We
can fake anything but emotion and you don't need that
In
collitch,lesser do we need it at university, we is very white
If
that's still permissible after all, and we can stall instead of
answer
Any
question with polyvapid bullwinks, like we sd "Post-Modern", when we
understood
the righteousness of Road Warrior and the Dead Cities
In
which we cd pontificate that what is ugly is not and what is icy is hot.
We
sd "Post-Modern Post-Modern" and the big guy in the sky pent house
Heard
us and signaled with a shiny coin of dismal that we were up to the task
Of
lying to hide the flaccid timidity of our mendacity.
We cd not be Cats
Or
Dudes, or Hippies. We like jazz,
but only lying down. We are the
Kenny G's
Of
poetry, but without the spangles. We
make a verse that dare not jangle or
Tangle
with the grim questions that crush the many fools who want to be unleashed
We
hold our peace except to say, "Post-Modern", which if you understand
THAT'S
IT,
The "Language", stripped of any diseased opinion, which is bourgeois
like
Meaning
and stories and decision and snappy politics like the Colored Stalin's
That
threaten to define us as ignorant as Crazy Eddie, the colleague
Stupid
enough to give interviews to restaurant owners on how they waxed
dey
fadder and socked it to dey mudder, and put a trope in each dey eyes
So
they could describe a world no one understood, but we could analyze as
Ambiguous
with decency. We sd then,
"Language" (but smelled funny) to hook it
up
with Czechoslovakia
And
the wordy birds of no it has nothing to do with the world, there is no world
Except
behind the dead patches where my self used to crawl.
Language! Pure
Language,
don't you understand? As if you
could be a Note Musician and away with
all
pests like what it mean or what it say or who it help.
We are text ridders and
trope
conceivers, we are more Dizzy than Gates and we ain't Lionel Hampton.
"Language"
for us, as long riders on the purple sage of the campus, where buxom
Whatnames
twist and shout and Little Richard will one day be chair of there.
Because
by saying merely "Language", and halting the shit right there, we
could
Make
the chairman of our department stare off into his last check what the heck
I
didn't understand Allen Tate, either at first, nor why Faulkner was not just
A
sticky racial mole, hanging on the unborn George Wallace Pen-is this interesting
or not? Without having to be weighted down by a goddamn narrative and
dismissing
the notion that what is writ has a writer, again we washed away the bourgeoisie
Except
ourselves hiding inside the dumbness of our square misunderstandings.
We
would be racists but that's been 'done. We hate Ginsberg and those guys because
they
said impossible things. You see we
are textual, Bush 2 and the group. By
dis-
missing
saying something we could creep neatly away from commitment or tiptoe
with
stunning graceaway from cranky values like Keats' mistake of Truth for
A
roof over your head and Beauty which as everyone knows is what the Pirates
Got
for stealing the election. Money
helps if you got some. It's one
reason I don't
Really
go for Negroes, they don't have no money. And
don't think our sprint away
from
what is this after all, just more bullshit?
Means we're type cast. Though we,
think
the idea of caste is jealously profound. Like
Seven Types of Amos and Andy.
Our
sense of humor spends as well as money. But
Niggers, of course, being oral
And
less than graduates refuse to think we funny, even if they say we funny, they
mean
to be insulting, and we are, after all, the neatest things to emerge since
The
Fugitive Kind. We were right to
kill Robert Redford. Who is
Tennessee
Williams
anyhow, but the nasty (I realize this is not politically correct, but that's
the
kind of humor that boils under our paper lips, we are not, like the colored guy
said
opportunists or big drags writing dull ignorant bullshit) “fag" who keeps
insisting
things
are ugly Down Home, We are the ghost of Halloween past and Halloween yet to
come.
We are reclaiming with Post-Modern, the reactionary smells of De Manns
and
the Yale condoms of slightly shiny murderers.
Sieg Heil! We think all
struggle
except
to be obscure is, frankly, rude. And
poetry with some subject or objective
description
of anything, except our next raise, our tenure tete ta tetes, my recent
article
in the The Exasperated Hinie, lewd. And
there you see how droll and
fantastically
empty.
We
need no one's sympathy we got tenure and a car.
We got trips sabbaticals to
anywhere,
so we can scribble like the Ish Kabibbles of the unreadable.
Remember,
Post-Modern
is a hip way of saying “The World Is Rotten & Must Stay Rotten To Be
Metaphorically
Ignored, Though Funny If You Gettin Paid" and All you creeps even
some
of my colleagues are stupid for trying to change any things unless they
offer
you a better office! Post-Modern is
what Rudolf Hess said to the people he
invited
to meet Himmler. Don't you see how
stunning? Language!
Without
Meaning. Without Narrative, Like a clever chum of mine, who pointed
out that
Balzac
cdn't be a Realist because there was no such thing as reality.
"Language", just
the
Woids, like ancient Neanderthal Boids. With
no one to claim it, or defame it. Or
name
it. Who cares for Brecht anyway, blood is not real except mine,
and I take my
consciousness
very Un and very Dry.
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