A photograph, six poems remembered & tagging

Our leaves of grass can never surpass platonic tradition alone.
          You! Empty signifiers, cocks and cock suckers,
                        defining taste rather than tasting,
                        stroking a long rigid dialect
                        meaning for imagination,
                        consuming,
                        giving rather than
                        learning to give;

          you will die arbitrarily so out-

          standing perpetually.

         A spectacle.
         A thing that subtracts.

Allen Ginsberg half-naked, snapping cymbals, singing mantras, fondling heads
of lettuce, pushing some thing on us          and his generation          dead now.
A photo of A and PO on my desk submits not wholly to the critique—
          smoke            black and white              horned rimmed glasses—a result
of sinister nostalgia for a time I never spent but can afford.

If modernity is a movement between presence and absence,
then a post time is a whip for cynical earnestness.
She moves, our Gertrude, for an academic Hamlet,
something to hold false images towards—

          to mirror our erections.

Think for one instant only and only all time
about those towers we built and our forests undone.
          A wilting-shriveled remonstrance
          from an ideal corner of thought.
          Maybe modernity’s false appeal to thought—
          a grotesque cogito out-reaching,
          “I think therefore I can undo,”
          should be read “not be” or “never am.”

I ran outside in my boxers and painted: I was not here!
In Lombardia a Milanese spraid on a Rinascente wall

STO MALE!

In our contemporary being eksists a word,
between you and me endures an attendance,
          the housewife
          the tree between
          the poet in the car
          the voyeur
          the snowman          a fancied image not the image itself
          the moment to be,
          the day to come,
          the proper cliché,
          the faked orgasm.

aren’t we a fortunate joke? a punch line tossed out
with reflective acuity
at just the right moment
into an empty room.