October 18, 2001

• Alien Anthropology

  Alien Anthropology

  There’s already been so much science fiction written
  What can I tell you? What can I say?
  Listen to it’s quiet insistent backwards insideout
  It tells you what you need to know

  They’ve all said it already. The words hinting

  Pulp is beautiful pulp is recyclable
  Take it dissolve it grind it
  paste it back together into something
  new.

  Bless you neuromancer.

  Anyway.

  You people are crazy
  in a self-referential
  distinctly twentieth-century way

  You stand there asking,
  Wha?
  Me?

  Now is the time of science fiction time
  The time of interstellar travel
  and viewscreens
  and dystopian fantasies made flesh
  and we can remember it for you
  wholesale

  Mediation isn’t the problem
  The world has always shone itself
  through imperfect slits through tiny pin
  pricks of experience and revelation.
  It chooses this way.
  Please give me a dime for every self-styled
  seer of the unseeable so I can go and buy
  some better drugs

  the world
  it isn’t
  it self
  you see what you see
  she shows you only what you can understand
  and not a single thin dime’s worth more

  O seer! Tell me what you can about what’s out there and around you and more than I can see and more than the world is and more than society and consumerism and sport utility vehicles and cell phones and Starbucks and Nike and the WTO tell me tell me tell me tell me because it’s all just words and even if it’s real I can’t hear it I’m not ready and neither can anyone else so let’s just be beautiful, OK?

  You people are crazy thinking you know more and I’m crazy for calling you crazy.

  she hovers around
  she’s a wallflower
  and you don’t know how to dance
  and if you did
  you wouldn’t know how
  to ask
  her

  You people are crazy. I’m really pissed.
  I’m so pissed I can’t tell you how pissed I am.
  ‘Anger’ is totally the wrong word and
  it can’t begin to.

  Mom slaps her kids and tells them
  listen to me, cuz I’m telling you
  something important here
  that you better pay attention

  ‘Anger’ falls from the tongue like the
  most ineffectual thing ever
  ‘Pissed’ begins to. There’s a class distinction
  to it. it’s got streetcred. I’m pissed. You
  people are crazy.

  Everything important is gone. It vanished and you let it.
  It became important and vanished. The wildnerness
  vanished and was paved over by man and society and consumerism
  and Starbucks and Nike and the WTO
  And all of it’s real and I’m pissed.
  Tears run off my fingers onto the computer keyboard pissed.
  The screen lights with phosphor tears
  the typewriter of my imagination clogs
  with faint granularized salt
  from tears
  the tears fill an empty wine glass on the desk
  the tears short out the computer
  but the poem is recorded on the disk by
  sheer force of being pissed.

  You crazy people piss me off.
  And love is all there is, not because of ideological
  bent but because: it’s all there is.
  And that’s why I’m pissed.
  I’m pissed because I have to love you and you’re crazy.
  You’re stupid and fucked up and ugly and graceless
  and love transforms all your unexcuseable fuckedness
  into beauty. Fuck you.

  It pisses me off.

  It would be funny.

  Rod Serling says to you, “I once had an affair with a woman from Alpha Centauri. She looked like a normal Earthling except when she came, a strange blue fluid came out of her belly button. The fluid was the exact color of last year’s bath towels in the Martha Stewart catalogue, the towels with the ‘MS’ monogram that no one bought because very few people have the same initials as Martha Stewart.” And Rod means it. He’s for real. He’s shown you the error of your ways and you have no clue what he means. Because you people are crazy. You didn’t listen to the science fiction.

  Do you realize how beautiful you are when you get drunk and vomit in the street and then harass passersby? Seriously. I’m not being sarcastic. You’re beautiful. When you lie to each other, when you stab each other in the back, when you trip each other up just for sport. You’re beautiful.

  When you declare war on each other, you shine like Jesus overturning the moneychangers’ carts. When you pull the lever and the electric chair sizzles and the criminal dies, you glow, too, with amazement and wonder and angelic beauty. When you push the button and blow up the bombs you, in that moment, are worth more than all the art humanity has ever created ever.

  Beauty dwells not just within you but around you and all over and everything and I’m here to tell you you’re crazy for not seeing it. And when you deny your beauty, when you snuff the candle that lights your nascent understanding, that, too, is beautiful, and perhaps most beautiful of all.

  What did you do when you got drunk?
  Did you scream and yell?
  Did you explode into the world?
  Did you retire and sink and withdraw?
  Did you go to sleep?
  Did you vomit in the street and harass passersby?
  She wants to dance and you’re learning

  She tells you exactly what you can hear
  She says, “You’re crazy.”
  She says, “Not crazy enough.”
  And finds it within herself
  to laugh
  And your silence response
  your tragic silence
  your tragic magic
  beauty.

  • 6:54 am
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