"From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories." - Taisen Deshimaru1
Cyprus news2 the benevolent fleck3
of insubstantial subsidized dreck4
to wallow in like timers5 in their time
—the realpoetic6 vicissitudes of rhyme7
intrude upon comeuppance schemes,7
the narrow-minded lip synch8 at the quarter beams,9
what egg on something fluffy10 in the dustbin lint remover11
with the bastard tint of structures12 doomed to be redeemable
gone to seed
gone to seed...13
The rimshot14 of a common law15
that strangles prayer and throttles raw
comes sneakily in canvasses turned green16 by stealth neglect
another virtue cigarette17 and the pins reset18 the net
It's all a gruesome company of manifolds19 and pinions20
to make this bumper car avoid decisions.
It's this, not that, not that, but this, no, this21
twists to scattered utterance22 of piss23
that sprays24 out from the inside
always leaves foul nests alone25
where blades are smoothed against rawhide26
and moons are only there27 to moan.
The daft encumbrance28 of the fool in stew
as the wooden29 ladle stirs shit in the brew
to share as some strange ritual
a demitasse30 of God
who never listens to their prayers
from choking on the cod
piece31 that the fool32 wore to appease
the ogres33 unappeasable who into dinner sneeze.
Courtiers and sycophants using up their mind
on useless, useless trivia that storms the brick-backed34 vine
to make cerebral sausage35 packed with innuendo's curse
to smite36 the site-shared property 37from library's wet nurse
Collect, refine, regurgitate; there are no students here
just teenagers with self-esteem that comes like ghosts38 with beer,
a dense machine of missile toss39 to train new future death
mongerers whose in-tuition40 pays to forget their breath41
and remember animosity in the pages of the past
the thing they have to say to prove they're worthy of what lasts
but there's no grand epiphany, no final festshrift blues
just twilight and the tolling42 of the dues.
And yes, we all believe in this, outside the ivy walls,
the place where dreams of intellect can prove we are not wrong
for making small decisions like a whore43 to win the day,
for tuning out the rapt outsiders44 song,
the theory of another, better way45
—but facts are facts the worth we give to scholars who can't teach
is the debt46 in the degrees, the slavery we can reach
in the threat of higher learning, the fear of steps behind,
that you could not explain yourself without a lambskin47 rind48
While Gracchus and Gawain await your every waking thought
they'll live in you without a grade49 of what might get you bought
from knowing they are valuable, as if you need advice
to catapult millennia for the pearl50 beyond a price.
* With Critical Apparatus
1. Quoted in Kubla Toledo. "Simplified Damage Madness." Comparative Consciousness 75 (1954). Vort Academy.
2. Reference to the headline in the New York Times on June 11, 2012 ("It's Cypress's turn for a debt crisis") homologous to that in the London Times on June 12, 1812 ("Cypress in debt ... again"). See Monica Structures. "Finding Intrinsic Grandchildren." Purloined Universe 10 (2010). Distance Hilaire.
3. Serbo-Croatian, from Dyskolos Pergolesi. "Towards Holographic Papyrologie." Byzantium Drummer 123 (1972). Serbian Hotel Institute. Reprinted in Racing Catharsis Yearbook
4. Yiddish "drek" (filth) vs. Old English "dik" (dyke). See Christ Rachewiltz. "Post-Symbolist Eros Masters." Multiple Meaning Apostle (1998). Johnson Lukács Antiquities. Reprinted in Annual Carlos Hebrew Food 2001
5. Broken alarm clocks. For clarification, see Longinus Sartre. "Giroux Efficiency Restored." Calculator Experience 1:102 (1984). Political Bicycle Scholarship.
6. For detailed commentary on the reading protocols for the use of this pun as episteme of historicity, see Johnny Seam. "Hyperion Lingering: Another Urinandum Transtextual Death." Hermetic De-Facement Interior 1 (1976). Unsung Toasts Institute.
7. e.g. rime. See Fruman Merkelback. "Sonnet Trouble Again." Paranoid Poetry Navigation 15 (2004). Eros Dare - Reader. Reprinted in Fine Wordsworthing (2008)
8. For a detailed discussion of the scholarship/innocence conundrum in Finnegan's Wake and The Simpsons, see Matthew Britannica's dissertation "Bagging a Homer: The Cryptozoologosization and Deratiocination of Canonical Culture in Finnegan's Wake and The Simpsons." Reprinted as "Bourgeois Nonsense: The Dialectic of Dialects and Dioramas" in God Disguised as a Binky: Critical Essays on the Simpsons (2009). Murdoch's Last Odyssey Press.
9. "Ruby are my love's red lips..." See Eva Gadjo. "Paradox Mastery Mulch." Cool Epistemology 16 (2011). Surprised University.
10. For a numismatic reading see Primal Eliot. "Amazing Spoon Scrivening in Moral E Prose Objects." Tensegrity Cellist 1 (2001). Penguin Oppression Press.
11. A plurality of scholars gloss this as a reference to the ancient world's most troubling epistemological riddle: "fuzzy wuzzy was a bear / fuzzy wuzzy had no hair / fuzzy wuzzy wasn't fuzzy wuzzy." For background see Tiny Dudley. Problem Transcendence. Billings, Montana; Last Horse (1987).
12. Before swiffers, surface lint was removed by small pans with tapered ends, whereby a thick brush "swept" the dust into the pan for disposal. See Lowry Kees. "Frobenius TV Theorizing." Rational Illustrations Bulletin 23:147 (1947). Sign Almanac Idea Collecting.
13. "Bodleian hegemony convergence as destablizing bricolage marks a shift from Althusserian structural totalities as theoretical temporality objects to one in which the contingent possibility of post-structuralist false parataxic epiphanies inaugurates a renewed conception of transgressive marginality bound up with facsimile contingent strategies for the rearticulation of patriarchal power sugar cookies." From Balloon Turner. "Vital Post-Poesque Censorship." Mythic Literary Revolutions 10 (1998). Carre Tombeau. Reprinted in Sharp Snobs 1787-1814: Feminist Calgary Anthology (2002).
14. See "Gene Krupa to the Butthole Surfers: from Polysemy to Ecofeminism," in Somnia Neant. "The Jargon Cabbages." Communication Cannibals 15 (2007). House of Rhetoric.
15. "Mauris iaculis eleifend dapibus. Cras eu libero id ligula molestie dapibus. Mauris euismod nulla eu odio ornare sed sodales ipsum lacinia. Nullam sagittis sapien ut erat malesuada tincidunt. Nulla facilisi.." Quoted from Sterne Partheneia. "Complete Spinoza Rounding Problems." Spinoza Quest 123 (1974). Reprinted in Spinoza Views Re-published (1974).
16. Rhymes with "player." See Henley Speculum. "Theorizing Space Friends." Euphoria Problems 17 (1948). Cyclops Checklist Library.
17. Copper-based pigments were common in paleolithic sites in Burma, but rare after ephrastik projectioning had been realized, suggesting a full stasis disruption in the sedimentary functionality of igneous gas deposits. Artaud Provender. "Distaff Rock Languages as Collideorscape Types Processing." Harvard Prehistoric Skull 192:1 (1957). Editorial Thermidor Foundation.
18. Jalououse, as argued in Floreal Tchelitchew. "Accompanying Plague Ambiguity." Uncle Yonder 1 (1982). Deconstructivist Americas. Reprinted in Sublimation Collecting (1994).
19. A reference to the Nietzschian concept of eternal recurrence. Bellow Herne. "Nineteenth-Century Danger Spells." Herakleitian Essence Revolutions 3 (1981). Mauve Thesaurus.
20. For a discussion of whether this is the intake or exhaust manifold, see Improved Poet Dog. "Factory Debate: Ornery Vermont Scorpion or Well-Tempered Boundary Airport." Indianapolis Genius 12 (1971). Chinese Vamp Gardens.
21. The smallest gear or the outermost wing of a bird, cited to enigmatize binary heterosexuality. See Cleanth Czar. "Rare Cartesian Battles." Uncommon Education Rhetoric 15 (1985). Contempt Season.
22. This line is a combination of Revelation 6:10 and The Devil in Miss Jones. See Annie Chapbook. "Annual Crane Limbo Romanticism." Balloon Languages 3 (1976). Every Greatness. Reprinted in Doomed Emma Essays (1981).
23. See note to Confusions Dowry. "Transgressive Cross-Referentiality in Dystopia: Dialogism Restored!" Assistant Scholars 101 (1994). Persuasion Notebooks.
24. ibid.
25. This reference was omitted from the final version published in the Buffalo Review, for fear of offending the sensibilities of native Buffaloneans. See Basil Braille. "Remembering Linguistic Amerika." Social Philology 102 (1987) (also in High-toned Epigraphik Statesman 4 (1987)). Cedar Top Languages.
26. Sadomasochistic envy, see Herman Mistakes. "Dialectical Gopherwood." Elsewhere Notes 15 (2003). Nude California Prose.
27. A physical impossibility, as pointed out in Lorine Hölderlin. "War After Rectitude." German Hidden Design 12 (1996). North Fearful Museum.
28. Cf. Stuart F Come Outside. "The Drummer in Gray Fields." Vegetal Voices 1 (2002). Radiant egiziani.
29. Proposed study questions: Why is the ladle wooden instead of metal? What do you think the author intended with this word choice? What emotional states are symbolized by wood, and what by metal?
30. Note the orthographic spelling here, cf. demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.
31. For a Rabelasian dynamism perspective, see Asilomar Bombazeen. "Satyricon This?" Today in Aristophanes 400:13 (1983). Unaware Paperbook.
32. See colloquium "Groot Case Harmonious Canons" in Anti-Selves Unmodern Formalist Navigation (Apron-String Narrative Conversion Special Issue) (2007). Shepherds Visiting School.
33. "The subsumption of feminism within a 'more comprehensive' field of gender studies, accompanied by the rise of a 'male feminist perspective that excludes women,' and the dominance within feminist thought of an 'anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term 'woman,' however 'provisionally' it is adopted, is disallowed' (14-15). The two trends are linked because 'the rise of gender studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the tendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of identity and the subject' (15). These trends are troubling for Ms. Parnassus because she fears that, insofar as gender studies tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a 'new phase' in feminism but rather feminism's 'phase-out.'" From Giorgio Manley. "Nutritious Lulu Leaves Cleansing." Sioux Grammatology 15 (1997). Damaged Americas. Reprinted in the Shoemaker Lectures (Pig Rag Maisie Writing).
34. A pun on brick-bat. See Cadmus Martin. 1960 Medusa Guidebook. Invisible Oxford Kentucky; Catharsis Global (1970).
35. For linkages to Upton Sinclair, see Shaker Terrell. "Hephaestus Preaching." Nazarene Absentee 10:2 (1974). Saddest Bibliographical Ideas.
36. Cf. Merry Wives of Windsor III, i, line 1326: "Well, I will smite his noddles. Pray you, follow." See Braque Wilbur. "On Commonplace Ghosts, Eye Keeping Mimes and Robot Ear Ambiguity: Some Invisible Avian Trivia in Shakespearean Darkness." Swahili Continuities 150:15 (1969). February Circle. Reprinted in Popular Morris Collecting (1971) and Shaxper Train Examiner (1972).
37. For a thorough discussion of Visigoth property law, see Griselda McLuhan. "Thoughts Post-Modern Ex Prefaces." Byzantium Labor 130:15 (1935). Italian Devil Letters.
38. Cf. Caspar the Friendly Ghost, who everyone loved at the end of every episode but everyone was afraid of at the beginning, suggesting something happened overnight that can't be disclosed on children's television.
39. Cf. Bruce Cockburn "I Wish I Had Rocket-Launcher." Wouldn't that be so fucking awesome?.
40. Oh, in-tuition, for tuition, I get it. Har har.
41. Cf. The Sompnour’s Tale line 32,987 "We have this worlde’s lust all in despight / Lazar and Dives lived diversely, / And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby." See Jim Rectitude. "Kipling Resistance Professorship Manuscripts Investigation." Master Absentee 3 (1963). Team Jesus Fragments.
42. For further discussion, see Saussy Renault. "Teaching Spiritual Romance Careers: An Incommensurability Construction Cabala." Contemporary Hero 7 (1993). Ishmael Limbo Gallery. Also Usura Fergusson."The Severance Manifesto." Seuss Alternative Linguistics 17:10 (1995). Yoruba Historiography.
43. "That's a thing, right?" Liz Lemon.
44. Is anybody even reading this shit?
45. I am going to go to Starbuck's now to get a latte and that hot chick behind the counter's number.
46. How many more of these fucking citations are there? Dude, I got news, this fucking poem makes no sense at all.
47. Do you want to watch my goop box? It's trippy.
48. Do you want to play charades with my cat?
49. Could I bum a cigarette? A light?
50. Do you want to read some of my poems?
