Sam Kaufman | uhwuhna at gmail dot com | also at cogito zero sum

Monday, January 20, 2014

Poem for new ears (1/2014)


Yes the snow is still beautiful
And doth blow
Filling the crevices temperately
Seizing opportunity to knock it out flat
There's nothing above it. So I turned on the
filaments, set tasers to Detroit
There is no other person so quickly developing
China's inner resources, however revolting
There is a form of thought in which we offer up
ourselves to those who seek eagerly to devour us.
Potlucks in forever, the incident unlimited
By contract and wind. When you are older
You may be understood. I hope you will eat.
*

Gaseous humor so ghastly as to elude
One million jihadi spotters on youtube
Made a monkey of detection, intelligence such a laugh
Back in my daybreak of coffee breaks at the polygraph
Girls, we showed them - everything they wanted to see
Now up it pops and harms the children.
I'd opt in - but my pension - and conatus is truth, 
and that's fate, nearly accompli. My friend, my accomplice -
Would you like rice with that? Against battery
As a culinary or domestic act, for justice
I am biased by the passions throbbing in my arteries.
The terroir is windy and has a petroid stink.
Blood from a stone. The best squeeze within the time and budget.
*

No place where sun shines and the wind whines and the lines energize
No place where the geology is impervious and the coastline unpervy
No point at which the lid flips, no fulcrum for the clamped lips
A natural convention
Between Thou, sand - and concrete steps
Known more or less at the outset
To the point - or purpose - of revolution
What is the topic? Official, cake and champeen
A reach and a stretch, bubbling 
To life, unobstructed and effervescent
No place we have been 
Yes we die - that is grace, said the dawn
Any place, any topic
*


Two arms flail like alarms
a knee in need is a knead indeed
two knees, tonight in tunisia
two feet march to defeat
And ears to fear what they've heard
Setting out on the rim of sand
With one or two brothers
From behind the desks and drawers false privacy
Our shoes still ours but inappropriate to piracy
The vortex of immolating ants, biology
Spirited away at each level of ontology
And what was left for us to seize in
Fed a synapse for a femtosecond opinion
*

First principles as universals, but powers of ten
Add some zeros to empiricism 
0, textuality
And the freeze carboniting the sidewalk
To a meat level - a locker, its floor narrowing
To unconstitutional force - to associate on terms of equality
Hooked and looking up, the wet lungs
Scream honest, but perhaps not wise
Behind each lamppost, burrowing churlish
The blowfly and the old mole 
Scratch figures blindly on the ground
How many of good sort
Unhindered unfolding
*

Regardless, it's less a matter of what you see
In the church of man-love
I will none of your money
Until the institution, manifestly constraining
Mends it shoes or shines its shilling
And down from above something is raining
While up foam foameth each and every
A bitter agent of the heart
In pestiferous ferocity
Swinging the head like a hose unreeling
Cuts through the tedium - O advertising
For being - Vomit sets, eventually gets
Mechanically removed by slavery.
*

Am I your slave, love? 
No, love, that's me.
---

Rosa deluxe: we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the thou- sand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist principles into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any textbook. That is not a shortcoming but rather the thing that makes scientific socialism superior to the Utopian variants. The socialist sys- tem of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its redefinition, as a result of the developments of living history.... The negative, the tear- ing down can be decreed; the building up, the positive cannot. New territo- ry. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and open- ing new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescent life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts. The public life of all countries with diluted freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spir- itual riches and progress.... The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise it will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.11

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