Theorists

The Parisians hated the watery rice,

Lack of wine, civilized amenities;

The marshes were stinking sinkholes;

The muddy fields execrable abominations.

They have friends, they said,

Who would gladly replace them with statues and fountains.

‘And you, my good man,’ they said to me,

‘are a depraved rustic, a semi literate bumpkin.’

Which is true.

Then they smoked opium and entered a trance.

I dug a new drainage ditch and composed six poems.

Upon awaking they snorted cocaine

And fondled one another’s genitals.

Afterwards they left in a railway car

Painted with scenes of ancient cathedrals.

I still love Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire,

But can find no solace in semiotics or hyper intellection.

They left behind four thousand books, which,

In an inquisitorial mood, I tossed into the fire.

Now the cabin is warm as toast

And in the mists above the dugout my visitor’s ghosts

Are suspended in a passion of disbelief and weeping.

The next day I leapt through my left earlobe

And came out the other side processed in stainless steel.

I lay upon a bed of nitrogen

Covering myself with plutonium rods.

Of course my earrings were of human flesh but no matter.

And yet when I looked through my enhanced eyeballs

I saw the world exactly as I saw it before!

All that and still rolling in the human bubble!
All that and my nose still exactly eighty-seven degrees from my left eye socket!