Al Fresco Cafe Poems #12

Al Fresco Cafe Poems #12

Has it all been pointless,
This waiting for Renata,
Renada, Nada.

The retired physics professor
Had calmed down, went
Went over to his table next
To the red brick wall with a poster
Of Lady Godiva on a motorcycle

To eat a goose paté.
He ate it with his fingers,
not a spoon.
He seemed very happy to find an excuse
To depart from my presence,
or my apparent presence.
This physics professor took
an immediate dislike to me when he learned
that I voted in the second century
For Valentinus to be bishop of Rome, Papa, Pope.

But there was still
Much turmoil during the night.

A skinny man with a large moustache,
Copied from Nietzsche came in trembling.
He was very confused, the fear of the terrorists
had disconcerted his thoughts, first,
he mumbled some Glossolalia: praise the chair,
comb the Drakensberg mountain range,
kill Stephen, kill the hen, go into coop,
Drag out the men and women alike, jail them,
hail them, sail with them.
Fail with them.

(The physics professor, a completely
transformed man
Yelled out, “No, bail them out.")

This skinny man was also a professor,
but a Professor of the Humanities,
And to calm himself, he recited a poem:

Cerise sopranos
Sing in the pale pines,
Accompanied by
The steps of a raccoon
Making music
From a pile
Of fallen leaves.
I walk on obscurities
In tune with the oboe
Of a quarter moon,
Praise the nude girls
Playing
the philosophies
Of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism
On Burma bassoons.

(The physics professor became enraged
when he heard the poem recited.

He yelled “That poem is a stooge,
a puppet to maintain the exploitation
Of late capitalism and its imbeciltic
machinery. I don´t hear the poet´s body.
The poet is not writing his body.
There is not even the ghost of
écriture féminine in the poem.
It is purely masculine linguistics.
As Hélène Cixous had declared,
‘write your self. Your body must be heard.´
I don´t hear his body in this poem.
This poet is so out of touch
with the world today.
He still believes in the gender binary."

The physics professor
Suddenly stopped his diatribe
When he glanced at his hand.
He unawarely was holding a spoon, my spoon.
Still holding the spoon,
He moved from the poster of Lady Godiva
on a motorcycle
To a poster of George Washington
crossing a blank space
With the caption, “There is no river."

Upon hearing of the physics professor
Critique of his poem,
the humanities professor
Went into convulsions. He started shaking
As if he had an epileptic seizure.
The café owner
Yelled, “Stick something in his mouth
Before he bites off this tongue." A waiter
Grabbed the spoon out of
the physics professor´s

Hand,

Stuck it into the mouth
of the humanities professor. The physics
Professor glanced for a long time
at the shaking spoon.

I went to the humanities professor prone
on the floor. I did not see
Any spoon. I asked the eye-witness reporter
did he see any soon.
He said, “No, he did not, but when
he wrote the article he was
Going to say there was a spoon in his mouth."
The eye-witness
Reporter looked at me, and said,
“As a journalist you know so
Many are foolish enough to believe
there is a spoon, that I must
Lie and say there is a spoon. You know,
I must maintain my status
And salary as the most popular journalist."

We looked over at the physics professor.
He was eating his goose
paté
With
His
Fingers.

Overhead, high up in the blue,
a flock of Canadian Geese flew
In formation to migrate the waters
off the Florida panhandle.

The humanities professor
Recovered from his fit,
Staggered, still dazed,
Stole my Negroni
And drank it, and he started a harangue:

“Due to the terrorists we are not safe anywhere,
a rock concert, the Super Bowl,
the fourth-of-July fireworks, Olympic Games,
Wal-Mart, Communist Cell meetings, Waco,
Little League ballgames, Indian
Reservation Casinos,
Nevada whorehouses.

Our country is under attack.
I don´t just mean “the attack phrases"
Of the language poets, but real tangible,
material attacks.
These terrorists are everywhere.
Our Res Publica is no longer safe.

I repeat, there are terrorists everywhere,
the Celtic-speaking people
Of upper, central and Western Europe,
the Cisalpine Gauls,
The Carthaginians, the Numidians,
the Iranian-speaking nomads
Of Eastern Europe, the Parthians,
the German tribes in Britian,
The Dacians, the Goths on the lower Danube,
the

Sassanid Shahs

Of Persia,

And the HUNS in the eternal city.

The terrorists are everywhere."


The physics professor interrupted,
said that the haranguer
In this list of what is destroying
our civilization
Had overlooked Gödel‘s theorems
that demolished Hilbert´s
Project of outlining once and for all
the axioms of mathematics
And logic.

You have overlooked C. S. Peirce
who preceded Sellers,
Quinne, Wittenstein, Rorty,
in their insistence that there
Is no ultimate foundations.

You have forgotten to include in your lists
of terrorists:
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari,
Jaques Derrida, Stanley Fish,
Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan,
Jean-François Lyotard.

At this moment, the physics professor
ceased talking. He
Was sipping
Sambucca as he spoke, and had finished
two bottles.
He passed out
And collapsed to the sidewalk

I, curious, asked the humanities professor
what his terrorists on his list planned to do
to our country. I interjected
That I did not consider those on the physics
professor´s lists
To be terrorists, but saints, our
Saviors, saints who saved us
from the language of lies
That the people speak.

The humanities professor sneered,
“I have never heard
Of anybody that the physics professor
mentioned. I think
These people are fictions
that the drunk professor made up.

But I will tell you, what the terrorists
will do to our country.
These terrorists are
Out to kill every living thing:

l. The terrorists plan to drill for oil
in Alaska
And disturb the polis of the polar bear,

2. The terrorists plan to declare wolves
are not protected animals
So sadists can indulge in the pleasure
of making the animals suffer
Before tearing up their beautiful fur
with bullets.

3. The terrorists plan to build roads
in our forests so the obtuse
And brutal can interfere with
the rendezvous,
Romances, and emotions of insects,
birds, and animals,

4. The terrorists plan to remove the ban
on whale hunting so the esurient fishing
industry owners
Can have more money to gamble in Las Vegas
And purchase BMW´s and the most-expensive
call girls,

5. The terrorists plan to open up some
of our last wild places,
Greater Yellowstone, Utah´s Redrock Canyons,
to the profiteers in energy exploitation,

6. The terrorists approved that the
U. S. Navy deploy a
Dangerous new sonar system across
the world´s ocean,
Creating a noise so intense,
much louder than rock music,
That this noise can maim, deafen
and even kill whales
And dolphins, just as rock music has maimed,
deafened,
And spiritually killed so many human beings,

7. The terrorists plan to open our few
national forests
That are left to logging, mining and drilling
and interfere with the life styles
and love lives of insects,
Fish, birds, and animals,

8. The terrorists want to let mining companies
bulldoze
Parts of the Florida Everglades
and dynamite them into
Open-pit rock mines. The terrorists want to
destroy the ground
That grows food for caterpillars to eat
and produce butterflies,

9. The terrorists plan to pour raw sewage
into America´s oceans
And water ways to smother unto death
the living creatures
Who have gills and breathe underwater.

The humanties professor grew more passionate,
more vehement;
“We must stop these terrorists.
These terrorists not only desire
To destroy the lower echelon of life,
the homo sapiens, but plan
To destroy the superior forms of life,
insects, birds, fish and animals.
We must stop these terrorists before
everything worthwhile
On this earth is destroyed, and about
the only things that will be left
Are oil derricks."

I, Norris
Benjamin, Jr.
Interrupted,
“Professor , Dr. Berry, those whom
you are talking about
Are not the terrorists."

“They are not the terrorists?"

“No, they are not the terrorists.
They are the Bush Administration."

“The Bush Administration?"

“Yes, the Bush Administration."

The retired physics recovered from this stupor,
arose, he was holding
A spoon,
Said, “Norris Benjamin, Jr. is right.
It is not the terrorists who are
Destroying all living things,
but the Bush Administration," but
His hand was still shaking,
he dropped the spoon, and his voice
Became very sad as he mumbled:
“I still have a nostalgia

For quasi-positivist certainties.
I have a nostalgia for the

Foundationalism

Of a context-free, ideology-neutral, universal
Theoretical language.

I can honestly state, sincerely state,
that I believe
There is something outside the text.
But I cannot
Find
It.

It makes me sad to hear literature
as mimesis
Has been abandoned.

I was even sadder when I found out
that the old
And time-honored distinction between
prose and poetry
Has been abandoned."

The retired physics professor received
another phone call.
It was from his wife who said, “ I have

Just burned
Our house.

I also burned the apartment you kept
for your mistress,
Renata Stra.
Unfortunately, that woman with auburn tints
In her dark hair escaped.
She is in the hospital with minor burns."

The humanities professor was flaggy,
flabbergasted,
Keep mumbling under his breath,
the Bush Administration,
The Bush Administration,
the Bush Administration.

With a great effort, he crawled up on a table,
And started reciting Zen Koans:

A sound is more pleasant
When not heard.
An unheard sound makes
More noise than a heard sound.

He who knows the law
Has never read the law.
He who has read the law,
Never knows the law.

Those who investigate
Learn they have made a mistake.
Those who never investigate
Have many certain beliefs.

If you look where you are going,
You will stumble on what is below.
If you do look where you are going,
You will stumble on what is above.

When something is clear to you beware.
When something is obscure to you beware.
When someone speaks wisdom beware.
When someone is silent beware.

When a person tells you
That he or she is certain
What he or she believes is truth,
You know this person is a fool.


Duane Locke

Posted over on The Pedestal Magazine