FOR THE MOMENT
Amanda is doing a photoshoot
they will tell their laureate
how to walk
what to wear
I’m listening to Chris Hedges droning
on like a Old Testament prophet
he’s lucky though, even if
so high on style,
when it comes down
to me
he’s preaching to the converted,
(Lord forgive me, thinking of
Amanda on the runway
about to take off into a
galaxy of camera flashes
I confuse
getting down to basics
stripping the fake from
our
postmodern reality
with imagining her naked
as though poets are distinct species, need
to find each other to breed
at least finally produce a progeny
with some hope of utopia
but you are
too much creature of hype and image, my dear
thing straight from the pages of
Frankfurt School or Jean Baudrillard)
meanwhile the planet (Janet) is going full Rocky Horror
the sky looking particularly alien this morning
crazy cloud cover suggest
something fomenting, certainty mutating,
firmament going to
crack and crumble like earthquake
hitting a
ceiling painting
that thing called nihilism
about to embrace us as all things collapse
but still
a world where first amongst equals
can spit out his poetic pronouncement
as to
how beautiful barbed wire can look
at night
or in the cold of morning
the morning Sun soon to relegate
concept of cold to
ancient memory
turning up the heat without
check
or balance
make our planet
more beautiful from a distance
shine
like Venus
(Amanda you are
your own greatest muse, your own
perfect Venus)
let
the Sun be
I hear them argue
none should interfere with, try
to temper
its holy predilections
and as
we sink
and drown
let us
find the new fetishes to sustain us
unlike you, my dear golden poetess,
my words damned to
spew, splurge, out
the wrong side of my mouth
as for you all, you nothing wordsmiths,
in that department
so ungifted
I tell you
to forget your dialectic, leave
teleology well alone
no secret code
under a rock
or
inside the rock
to divulge way out
of the labyrinth
if no
sense of wonder, just
a carcass of hunger
would it be worth
any trouble at all?
Amanda has finished now
the recital is over
the whole of humanity (or
at least
America)
has climbed that Hill
as so dutifully, democratically,
rhythmically instructed
she
smothered by a wave of wildly polite adulation
steam-rollered by machine of ecstatic
and yet
so precisely calculated
fashioned
for the moment
non-fake utopian applause.