Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Great American Novel - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 


1.

The black out man, the white out man

All the muses of the Company

Busy

 

Forgetting the nation’s memory

In our hidy holes, we eat the reports:

who was who and who was where

When the torturer took the stair

To the top of the tower with the cash in his

Pocket

 

And assassinated the president

(name redacted) of the country

(name blacked out).

This, too, is happening .

Oh oblivion my darling

Principle Researcher: (name blacked out)

“he also prepared a paper on the magician’s art

and the covert communication of information (mind-reading).”

 

2.

When your electronic veils all come undone

and nobody’s left for your kinda fun

take a (redacted) pill in the noonday sun

your mind to stun.

 

3.

“I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk—where before I felt a defiance only”

He sez, speaking for me, me, me

Though I look like a million bucks today

And have the coat to prove it.

I put my calmness in a cute little Benz and drove it over

The bones over the bones of the road

Built on an old Indian hunting trail:

As per Uncle Dunny’s table conversation.

 

“The liquor laden car he was driving

Plunged from the road” - and into the gnatter

of insect splatter

on the windshield of our family memory.

4.

I was born too late to be a poet who writes “all”

And means it through sermon and circumstance

Until I’m mummified among grasshopper and vine

 

- My all’s a smaller thing, all mine

and has its America, its hurricane glass

Its anecdotes of life in 1999.

It thinks that driving across the country will be

An exercise in all-creating liberty

 

signed and sealed by polaroid

like Ed Ruschka’s or Warhol’s

of the whiteline insignificant that haunts

every all with its tics and taunts.

 

My all is out of whack today

My all has drizzled quite away

My all is in drops and droops its head

My all is the lights out of the dead.

No comments:

Dialectic of the Enlightenment: a drive by

  Enlightenment does not begin with the question, “what is the truth?” It begins with a consideration of the interplay between two questio...