MATVEI YANKELEVICH
Thought is Cypher
Last year
thought was bourgeois.
This year I can't even think.
Can't afford it.
Thought -- the new poverty-chic.
Bubbles. Code
for breaking into one's head.
The reversal of the dirt. The leap.
Last time I thought closer
to my soul, my mind
lost to your queen. Or was
it knight-errant?
Look at the rhetoricity
of the command. Will the woman
to walk through the door. Will
to stink less of life.
Thought, you are restless,
but where is the key?
Think. Exile and dentists. What
party were you not invited to attenuate?
Oh, where did you go? Swimming?
The baroque mind, gone to rock -- oh,
young. Thought -- you are fickle.
How did the war
get so cold? And I old --
KNOW THIS: a rough-speaking
silence ain't nothing much.
Thought is but potential; i.e. every little thing
she does
lost in a pile of happy endings. By the hedge,
the pool, the lost era of pure thought --
man is a thinking machine, and
the machine -- a thinking man?
Could thought be nothing in the face
of action, a pretty face. Fill in
the thought. Sex is a thought
I've had. So are YOU. I'm in a play.
What's your move, Creator Rick?
How does thought proceed -- shoot. Plotting
along, listen to real things in the world.
Ask the real things how they feel
about being real.
What's their news? Breeze is thought
caught off-guard. Grid Kafka and you get...
(I don't know, Pynchon, or something.)
If only I had a penny for it. This whole
poem cost me a dear twenty in beer
and that's not counting
my hourly wage. I hate church!
I hate that kind of thinking. Lackluster
stuff. Shoot the thought that made us
believe. I believe in desire -- desire
to believe (for instance) that we can
beat death.