Abduction (Rape Fantasies),

USE & ABUSE

Allow,
Therefore, that in the
planetary scene
Your disaffected
flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy
bellies in parade, Proud
of such novelties of the
sublime, Such tink and
tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame,
whip from themselves A
jovial hullabaloo among
the spheres. This will
make widows wince. But
fictive things Wink as
they will. Wink most
when widows wince
Wallace Stevens



Indo-European: rep – to snatch, seize:
“rape,”
“rapacious,”
“rapid,”
“rapt,”
“ravish,”
“rapture” & grab-it stuff like that.

“Surreptitious” as well as
“reptile” (from Latin: to creep) :
all in the family values,
etymological siblings.

I rape the children: me, village elder,
presbytering a kind of noetic circum-
cision & cerebral clitorectomy
continuing institutionalized traditions
& the industrial constraints of alma
matrix, forcing kidlets to domy bidness
against their natural born willy/nillies
& double forcing them to pretend to
LIKE IT, too.

yes, Yes, YES, this IS what I want,
Sam, sock it to me: I wouldn’t be
doing it on my own, not knowing
what’s good for me: take my
attendance & attention efficiency
span & make me learn, damnit.
Show me the syllabus.

I would show them the cunning,
if not the uncanny Liberal Art
as opposed to, as differentiated
from & not to be conflated,
collapsed & confused
with the liberal arts.

Built-in tacit violence bears us away:
full of soundless, furtive fury so sub-
liminal it looks like teen spirit, like
dedication & discipline & no clothes
line need demonstrate the surreptitious
secret school-daze rapture going on
all in the family.Mum’s the word:
Can’t be said without demoralization
round here or anywhere: a cultural
relativity: relaying the relations relatively.

“Age is no better, hardly so well
qualified for an instructor as
youth, for it has not profited so
much as it has lost. One may almost
doubt if the wisest man has learned
anything of practical value by living.

Practically, the old have no very
important advice to give the young,
their own experience has been so
partial, and their lives have been
such miserable failures…” ( HD Thoreau )

Well, anyone can counter this claim
I’m making, just describing (not a
judgment: lord knows judgment just
generates resistance): the violence
of hire education; and proffer,
proclaim, profess an
opinion of one’s
own.

We can argue.

It’s no go-to-the-library, Google-it-up,
or ask-the-Davids kind of a deal, true?
Stunning, I hope, the accusation.
Diametrically if not diabolically
opposed to inertial status quotidians
& operating assumptions sufficient
to put them all in play, maybe.

“What ME, raptor? I’ll have to
take issue if you say that again!
Beg to differ!”

Bring it on, then. We can improve
my terms, I’m sure. We can argue:
how-it-is we do what we do and get
away with it in this age of exponential
techno-logical industrial information
over-whelming lap-top dancing.

Or what’s a college for?


(go ahead: pull my finger)

xxxooo, Epimenides the Environ Mentalist
(“All myn are Environmental!”)

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
Wallace Stevens