The Youngster: But Stranger, how can we tell whether we cut between the bones, or not?
—Plato, Statesman
 
If we recognize the variety and groundlessness
of grounds, if we speak from perplexity as
opposed to portrayal, if we are locked into the one
approach dominant in our time when
problems appeared at the periphery, "our distinctions
so that they cut between the bones," can we
promise the ethical stand of employing critique
or such assumption as to give voice and image
in light of solace or satisfaction? There is the body
which one and the person for whom.
There’s a line
of security glass against handgun, crowbar and
baseball bat—is there no bond, none, to what follows
 
 
 
Piano wire of the last words said when it
once led to ginger-kissing mr son of william
tell invisible to himself, anfractuous.
Monologue for which there is no conclusion
no uproar no new guest amenities
no smile of the unforeseeable no nurse
to fill this rachitic prescription. Eroded
sources for public support, prosthetic
extension of the media, engineer to
employ me in this real and storied time
together in single and multiple
channels for the moving image
when this is written in the dark when
simulacra to surveillance as the secret
cause was to history in duplicate, original
demesne and mind-cure monument
 
 
The intelligentsia of Los Angeles—a clover
leaf—is anathema to the Industry
composed of citizens so obsolete as to think
the elements of consensus and fit
are an act of translation or the willingness
to listen that allows for the true resolve
how many of us on line & in rank
when it all functions at lower best
Electronic velocity to deepen capital’s
culture in the digital West an onslaught
by money demands and scientific compliance
in metropoles where rape is committed
every fifty-four minutes and the new moons
Caliban and Sycorax astronomers allege
by radiation dark-red into hydrocarbons
of old in the history of the solar system
 
 
The memory of genocide or slavery or sexual
abuse if the former event precludes a claim
if it threatens to destroy me with lesser
arms and munitions over land mines
to blow off the phantom limb of the already
severed self by degrees of experience. Developed
nations later this week out of history endure
in nuclear storming when global theory
and new shapes insurgent welcome
the largest diaspora in the world of who said
can you see by the sequoias of California to
Niagara Falls? Trace was the term you erased
in translation. Or was it debt? Was it index?
 
 
Field of material contentions and conflicts
in dreams of radical equality | market
by the name of liberal assets unleashing
in patterns uncontrolled so lawless
and brutal a concentration of wealth
and surplus such magnitude of deprivation
ever thriving to be more dissatisfied or
satisfied in a culture at odds internal devoid
of all patterns in civic life neither tolerant
democracy nor the promise of a unified
collective wager will survive its sway
as the final arbiter of the social good.
Prepared all told to safeguard the borders
of external threats to our security
Lingua franca in which this is written
embody the moral bind | include us all