Maoist Kayak

It would appear that most of the beautiful and brilliant young folks in Paris during the last half of the 60s, leading up to May ’68 and its depressive aftermath, were one sort of Maoist or another. Among the radical leftists there was much sectarian bickering and rancour such that many Maoists were official enemies with one another. The poster children for the beautiful and beatific Maoist Parisians are surely Anne Wiazemsky and Juliet Berto in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece La chinoise (1967). Godard said of Maoist China that its greatest accomplishment was creating a nation where they only needed one book, a little if notorious red one. Personally, I’d go for the Analects of Confucius, but that’s hardly here nor there. No nation will ever actually be operating on a single book…no matter who’s the crook or how badly the populace be shook. “Mao thinks in an almost infinite way,” says brilliant but often vexing French philosopher Alain Badiou. Mao certainly didn’t know how to control or direct the widespread chaos and mass murder of the Cultural Revolution, whether or not he thought like I Ching. After the revolution the main purpose of the Communist Party was to make sure shit like that didn’t ever happen again.

The Persian empire was so wide

they did not believe the sun shined

beyond their borders.

“One could claim that the Paris Commune in 1871 was a complete ‘disaster,’” says Badiou. “20,000 workers shot to death in the streets of Paris—nevertheless, it was by reflecting on the Paris Commune that Lenin developed the means for a victorious revolution in 1917. Likewise, it is only by reflecting on the Cultural Revolution that we can prepare for the future of the communist political movement. Why? Because the Cultural Revolution was the sole example of a revolution under the conditions of state socialism. It is no coincidence that the most important creation of the Cultural Revolution took the name the Shanghai Commune.”

Imagine you are travelling 

over a great expanse of terrain

engulfed in flames

and not a single soul

has answer

for your inquiries.

Imagine you need

to pass through town

cloaked.

 

Three Drawings

I would prefer not to.

- Harman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Let them have all of it, his measly joy, his scrapbook past, his hope, too.

- Stanley Elkin, “The Conventional Wisdom”

The Bartleby Zygote 

Sky-Smashed Face

Hillbilly Fuckery (At Very Least Their Yellow)

Burning Bush

 A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.

- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

The last act is the one with nobody in it.

- Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time 

kayakBluE99

1.

I was the dashing rogue who tap-danced through your doorway in manta ray boots acting like he and Dick Nixon out of San Clemente was, like, tight in the buddy-buddy way, or worse, more lewd, who knew? 

LOL and WTF duffle-up along with us, am I right or 

United Arab Am-I-Rights?  

Have I got these Gucci shoes on too tight? 

Does Neolithic man still cry out in the night? 

It took me ten years to learn to kick a can with a spoon. Crawfish in your underpants? Then we shan’t be accepting you back into the tent, and you’re two months owing on rent. Blimey, blimey.

2.

I was a military experiment from the get-go but also unfortunately a stagecoach wino and scapegoat for those who refine oil, like my pa, riding side-saddle to God. My gimmick is ridic when I throw the lit match into the oil slick. Hindustani upgrade on the reg, overshooting the relaxed calendar of official relaxation, already brazenly in arrears in the preordination, is this here your surcharge, honey, under the Sony Playstation?

Riddle me this, co-worker, is that your piss in the thermos I dearly miss? 

Is this your idea of a functional ham sandwich? 

Next time you pass me by try not to scrape your undercarriage.

Stopping me in my tracks like I were anthrax is a cheshire cat checking facts. 

I throw down sawdust and encamp myself in the terminal building, counting to one hundred. Pill-popping, pip-pipping Penelope awaits her Odysseus…or does she? I’m a little bashful, all and all, even when I'm having a ball, so why did I hand my little pink puckered starfish to four unfeeling prep school assholes who should be more than sufficiently satisfied with beaver? Is it the holes like cigarette burns in the ozone layer? Something ado about my hair?!

3.

I went grocery shopping with the Marquis de Sade and he came out carrying a cabbage, slobbering. He’ll stick his quill whither he will. I have an appointment with celestial anointment, driving on the wrong side of the road like a Brahman bull ‘cause I feel impenetrable and enlightened and all my sensations and sensitivities feel like they's heightened. 

This isn’t a soap opera, it’s just plain old soap…if hardly for the likes of you. Come back when you’re dressed less like the pope and no longer committed to rocking the boat. My baby, she’s a trough full of offal, prognosis naturally isn’t fuckin’ hopeful. I’m not usually boastful but: 

I’m in some kind of torpor and I...

I’d like to offer up my aubergine with a side of leeks

then set up a sting and see who peeps. 

One day life will be a game where nobody any longer cheats; 

try to be a little more sly with your crib sheets and little 

bookie notebook, 

my sweets. 

Try not to cook the cook—

4.

In pulchritude and lassitude I was nevertheless the lad who could 

not be fooled even as he was forever overruled by roaming bands 

of cock-blocking fools—what is the hour of your appointment 

with His Highness? Sorry, I was smoking a blunt and 

now here we suddenly find us:

SocksCrates and Owlcibiades!!

The State of Texas

 

Straight Crushin'

If the other suffers from hallucinations, if he fears going mad, I should myself hallucinate, myself go mad. Now, whatever the power of love, this does not occur: I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see those one loves suffering, but at the same time I remain dry, watertight.
- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

It is not uncommon in love to experience [a] heightened sense of one’s own personality (‘I am more myself than ever before!’ the lover feels) and to rejoice in it as Nietzsche does. The Greek lyric poets do not so rejoice.
- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 

Forest Lawn Jug Wine Lady

 

The Clodhopper EP Lyric Sheet

 

Minerva Sitting on Your Face

Just as rather than mass, “megaton” is a unit of explosive power, I feel I might explode watching you pout over your whisky sour. Shawinigan is ‘inn’ again and I’m breathing from a canister of oxygen whilst pumping petrol in the third circle of hell with my arms ripped off and beating me about, curb the culprit, chasten the knave, rub that corticosteroid cream on his snout, I don’t know why you laughin’, jackrabbit captain, dagnabbit, I’ve seen the ultimate shape of things and it’s Minerva sitting on your face. I suppose you could say I haven’t so much as an inkling far as concerns the trials and tribulations of God’s lonely weakling and the ceiling of meaning, I’ll help you toss and upend the radius ‘cause frankly I was basically made for this, galoshes and gambling losses, the missing superposition upon us. Which one of you apron strings stuck his brass wand in the state of things? 

Building a Barricade 

There was a kid in school who said I looked like David Spade, so I took him to a field and killed him while it rained. I had grip tape on my skateboard so it tore skin and flesh when I swung the motherfucker which is what I liked to do best. I beat my chest, short selling has the potential for unlimited losses if the stock price rises instead of falling off of the roof and onto a awning, hitting the dirt like the perfect gymnast flirt, striking a pose in Aunt Ginger’s pantyhose, the disembodied nose consecrated in Gogol’s prose. Gonna make us a barricade just like grandma made in Vienna in 1848, never placating a single gallivanting first mate, never one to give a sucker an even break. How do we obliterate the nation state and replace it with something we don’t know how to create? Am I to be the creditor of the primogenitor and whatever else y’all got over there? He is me and the reverse and each of us a lie buried in the coconut cream pie. Papa don’t preach, gonorrhea ain’t no laughing matter. The barricade is a challenge to ascend but at the top there is a quaint little park bench and a coquettish crow-like lady who if you asked her she’d probably say maybe. I’m not anywhere in particular right at the moment, stalking the halls looking for an opponent. 

Our Simian Architect 

I used to have a rhesus macaque but the little bastard bit off my thumb and wouldn’t give it back, so I traded him with the circus and went into sanitation services, the monkey still there and catching up fast, he’s got cirrhosis of the liver now, the slightest inconvenience makes him growl and scowl, he’s looking for someone’s niece, looking to eviscerate somebody. He’s a very cute monkey this monkey, but good fucking riddance, he’s one to disembowel whom and whatever, he’s saying “red leather, yellow leather” stranded in the stalled elevator. Now is time to put this monkey to pasture. Was that a good capture? Of all the photographers I’m the most full of throwing stars. Duck, Jeepy. That one’s got your name on it.  Look at it square on, Baby Krishna, bedazzled and unsettled in the fundamentals, on the lawn as the day is long, a lengthy string of pearls stretchers to hither and yon, the simian architect of our sweepstakes and side effects amalgamates the scalded primates everything which was but loose, every which way but loose, which is how the monkey damn well choose to have it anywho. You are carrying around the molecular bioterrorisms of everybody you ever fucked. I addressed the simian architect on your behalf and Maestro says “best of luck.” Feel me, I do not have a bug on me, Uncle Fudgesicle, I arrive before you nothing but spangles and angles and of course ankles with occult ornamentation, which I will use to hypnotic effect over by the abandoned Backgammon station. Everyday warfare is everyday but who cares? It is never fun to truly care and then get caught ever-so-unawares. I am reigning king of standing long jump, just watch my bizzle bizzle take off. One man and one gorilla versus all the rhesus monkeys I ever loved with all my heart and then had my heart fail to start, yes, these many monkeys, except vividly and nightmarishly drunk on communion wine. Where was I going with this? Hey, monkeys, chimpanzees, what the fuck? I sill see your silhouettes in the impenetrable vacuum of unlit potential. Speaking of which. Little Baby Krishna meet Little Baby Molotov. And everyone was happy because there weren’t no longer a problem to solve.

Beverly Tweaking 

Periwinkle originated in Eurasia, I’m gonna make you a deal ain’t nobody ever made you and it ain’t as if I’ve previously maimed you or unnecessarily detained you, like they done with the son of God before they racked him up on the cross and went back to getting sloshed. I am the nightmare advocate. I don’t never see a nightmare that I don’t immediately wanna take its case, litigate, demonstrate the whole of my gumption to the magistrate. Beverly, knock-kneed, can spin the rig nattily in her denim finery, down at the winery, the Cossacks in boxes and sex fiends in the crosshairs, I’m gonna take a dump on the back porch of the Evening News Man and his child bride. Beverly tweaking, Beverly drug-seeking, a drug sniffing canine in reverse, her band used to tour in a hearse. Beverly listening to the Carter Family, the most companionable band in history, ‘cause it always makes her feel better. I have a solution for you, Beverly. Everything that’s ever been has been no more than a screen as you and I have plainly seen. Can we get more critters to see what we mean using the logic of the encounter at the heart of Anthropology? “Igneous rock.” “Ignis” is Latin for fire.

Turkey Farm

Welcome to my turkey farm, dove, love from above, and as a girl who got her radar love tough, it’s just the kind of place to squat and avoid harm, the farm, with the fences all guarded by gendarmes. You done gone and bought it in your silly, frilly bonnet, doggonit, the Scotsman’s daughter struggles for that anointed other shore, sure she’s bound to blow the show when she meets them at the castle door. Ahoy, to the ransacking parties I say have at her, and if knights on horseback come be sure to promptly scatter. To the trailer park, we embark in the dark from the turkey farm. Fiddling about in the back of a drug store Weegie triggered an alarm. Whenever we visit town we seem to have to bolt in a hurry just as cockroaches scurry and old matrons worry. And just how dirty were the dirty thirties, Walker Evans, with your microfibre hair towel jamboree and disbursement of the jump kick? Come drop me however quick, I plainly won’t let the lessons sit. Let’s be quick and drop a stick in the abyss. You one of them mangy motherfuckin’ Rothschilds? When it came to the turkey farm I always sort of felt that is was the best sort of place to hide Aphrodite’s love belt, all kinds of people must have felt as I have felt, waiting in the suction chamber for Franklin D. Roosevelt. I watched a dude hustle three card monte and then there were a hustler inside of me, and very rapidly two and then three. 10 kilograms of goddamn, Weegie, get me back to the infirmary amidst the gravestones. Put me down prone and alone so that I shall know what I have known from the cradle to the stone, my dear mama’s love the only love I suppose I’ve known. Oh well, at least I done killed thirty of them filthy Yankee such-and-such’s. I’ve been reading THE CARE MANIFESTO by The Care Collective, though it is mostly only my turkeys I love and to whom I give directives. And I know exactly what you’re thinking volkvolk. How does he manage to pay for all those sweaters? Why does he do interpretive dance outdoors in all weathers? Is this a fiend who ought to be exiled? To where, you pincushion clown with your frown upside-down? Nowhere wants me any more than here does, cous. All I know about what I want is it’s got curvaceous childbearing hips and is good at reading lips. I’m up in Tinder like “hope you like turkeys” and teetering over giggling ‘cause giggling is a thing again. THE CARE MANIFESTO says we need to care ‘across’ difference. I confess to hardly being able to understand all the resistance. I’ve got one-hundred-thousand nanobot micro-assassins chewing through my Lothario pasteboard scaffolding and paste sacks and jello snacks, rubbing Big Macs lasciviously all over the new slacks you sold to me. Ape up, partner, and go proper degenerate or by God there ain’t no end to it. In ten seconds we are going to pull on the emergency break of this motor vehicle you are right this minute driving at considerable speed and there just ain’t a sweet plain Jane thing your mewling ass can do about it.