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TWO ESSAYS
by Michael Farrell


Dude 2: '& Then?'

In surrealist texts fountains jump on dogs & software eats Beethoven's bone marrow. In Dude, Where's My Car? Andre Breton is channelled through the voice of a Chinese woman who repeatedly asks '& then?' through a drivethrough intercom. Eventually Chester trashes it. Does Chester lack imagination? Jesse continually dreams of a life other than the one he's living & they're both too wasted to remember the bizarre chain of events that made up the night before. Yet both are open to the chain as it continues & unlikely to have resisted its beginning.

[ : Dreary beauty
[ : Description
[ : An 'I' like Prufrock
[ : A revolutionary 'I'

The boringness is that of the dreamer ...

... Rewrite poem with more expression ... my god your llama just knitted an exit sign ...

' ... culture ... must refuse to be merely the image of Society's lack ... (refuse to represent a "meaning" rather than being lived by all)'
                                                                                   from Debord by Jappe

'if we must we shall break our wretched lyres & do what artists have only dreamed of doing'
                                                                                    Holderlin

Do we buckle for forgiveness? Finding depth instead of cardboard?

Or do we grip our integrity like a plaster swan? Each relationship beginning at a new level of desperation and suspicion, till all we feel is the ostrich peck, our hands firmly on the wheel of our long lost car?



Thunned: Kinsella's 'Hunt'

The longer the fall ... She copies herself into literature. Pretend to externalise desire. I got caught up in the transfer. The red hunt cracks on kids' backs. Fascination: keep feeling. It's not permanent but it's captured. Once we thought of more than sinking or floating (excrescent virtue).

I remember you like a doctor. Is that the way? Let me rather believe the ash tree. We're half dead together. I loved an author -- possibly. The salt's mixed with the old.

Like a blonde Demi Moore, a sour totem on the land. Mr Oizo and I get the cows in. We look to the horizon and if that fails, the moon. It's the same in England, it's the same with foxes. The taint survives as taint. The mood too is passed down ... Oppose for a different prize.

*

That's what we say, violence a form of discourse. Why cry? Who follow? The audience lap affronted. Imagine following a bull into the bush. The joke is we think we get that it's not. The war appears in the change room. The desire to be prior.

Hedge. Until they read novels, until they killed. Can't victory still be a sign? I chase after infection in my own way; the fatal baseball game resumes: I've moved into victim's base. They go on growing the wheat, go on growing the wool. Freud says they listen to themselves at least.

I'm still a teenager. (Easy targets.) What hurts are the analogies. It's the new minimalism -- said the hogfed of grapes. The truth's for mice to speak. Reverse the eruption and cure the mountain. Saved by a god of a comic turn.

*

For the visitor. For the journey. A screen for camp, yet noone to play it. The child becomes symbolic against its parents' wishes. How can they? Is death so small? The town dogs go mad. The poem has its own will. Thrown upon self- knowledge, unaffected by despair?

Today's red sorbet's enough story. Finding a killing ... there, padding lightly over the land ... The paperweight in the hand turns the origamists away. His abject tongue given tulips to carry (to New Amsterdam). I gather my bible friends, my English history friends, they underline what I need.

My hands are in the abstract, my mouth shoots concrete. Do your worst. Icon pursues icon for its aesthetics. But there's more! (The rhetoricians want it.) They face each other in cinematic illusion.

*

I found one, and though its name was a lie, I liked it. You missed something, there, near your belly. How sunny was it? Was it in your eyes? Give an animal a break. I marry a group of birds. Is that abuse? Swift -- Montaigne -- Ovid - and beyond. Blood thins, thickens. There's your path ... and there's your town.

Mirrors happen. Thunned. Kaleidoscope-drunk. The images make play out of the drive. A Velasquez I never looked at, not properly. I knew what dad's world required: I couldn't enter that theatre/realm. Where words ironised the water from Christ's side. The kids are pleased, they'd been afraid the simulacra wouldn't stretch. Treachery or denial? Or? The taller, the greyer the tree, the lighter the air. Bushman's 'coincidence'. They lose on the swings. I hunt a kiss. Titania.

*

The pain wasn't constant: these moments were edited. Fish reborn as sentimental. I tell a film of my life. You'll feel. The water though the dogs are after.

One step further (off the paper) off the wall. Even if the bike goes, will it say anything? Outside the tradition, I mean. During the afternoon it vanished. Graphing of a disco dancer patient. We'd been wearing the wrong glasses, and assumed the wrong lenses.

Spiritual feelings -- awkward. Leading to blood. Building ships for a little love. Do you show how poor the fruit, how rich the jam? The genders fell apart in the storm/crash.

*

The dogs wake. Don't give me -- don't tell me ... The pin becomes the spear and the paying's dear. When needed it heads that way, but the needs get mixed, and the route uncertain.

The symptoms come early. A bit of past reglued, retouched. Some have the sense to keep off the horse, and just let it go (or kick against the rails). But then some just want the riders home. Knowledge like a school fort. We lash out for lack of breath. Everything repressed is bleeding out. To truly be a victim, that would justify the pain? And -- inevitably -- god. Humans can't help adding levels, becoming replicas of what they enter.

The bird fell: topheavy. The guilt makes us stop and do it again (with more drugs). How about truth? Each politics like a net. Enough fur to drape a spectre. I'm tiger, aren't you Him?

*

Closer, in more directions. Don't call me ... So much of life goes west. Can I keep on looking, without being drawn in, stung? Here I'm not a hunter, look at me "through the lion's neck". This sting's for tripping myself.

What I like's small enough to keep. Like a gold chess set, nothing happens. I forget it's real in the canter. Actions refer to a purpose -- not each other. Reaching in or out for compensation. Lose a sense of prey; allowed a wolfshead.

He contributes a body part. Bullets light enough to float. We talk on in the empty court, and as every sentiment receives but echo, restick the straws in our mouths. The dream of the shared toothbrush recurs. Didn't you kill my brother?

*

Sermon on rust. Tired -- can't stop. Spare some looseness, some spareness? We cut it up rough so we'll know tomorrow. The twostep's a radical dance, whether you want to do it or not. It's obvious that the rabbit in the bathroom ... Analyse that! (Pinks flower.)

The advantage, if you don't stop, is what you get on the way. I show respect to what I shoot down, in case the shots are painless. There's no once. Art won't get noone out of this.

I don't waste time on the shitty when you're with me. There's no dead aspect. In lieu of you/me. Theseus touches the dewy red leaves.