the talk I gave on Maxine Gadd last night--

MAX POWER

UNDER BYZANTIUM
from THE SUBWAY OF THE CONFEDERACY

CALLING FOR LONG BOWS IN THE BEDLAM OF BUTTONS & BOWS

The map is not the territory. It isn't even the territory. (Joel Oppenheimer)

'Bun' is such a sad word, is it not. And 'man' is not much better (Samuel Beckett quoted by Maxine Gadd)

CAPITALISM IS CAUSED BY WARS; COMMUNISM BY FLOODS


All history slides into Whig History

Yu feel at ease with yr amnesia

that is the story of us & how we became us
& how it becomes us
to so naturally occupy
our exalted place in the scheme of things,
                                       at the end of things.

NO WAY TO RUN ANYTHING, PRETENDING THERE IS NO AUTHORITY

Even the present disposition of
la cosa nostra, post-avant garde poetry--
a corpse from which increasing amounts
of blood paradoxically seem to flow--
disports itself as though
its shuffling zombie compromises
were the best of all possible worlds
nuked in the eighties 
or that the public life of poetry is
somehow best sustained
by using higher education
Nibelungen style
to convert the enthusiasm of young people
into credentials & debt & gelt--
by mining their good will
as one would clear cut a hillside
into a smile--
into an assumed permanent natural order.
Rendering unto Caesar.

God loves only Augustus. 

Byzantium lasted ten thousand years.

This contract has given all the communities of
contemporary poetry, for all their competing modes
& methods, an underlying unanimity
borne of fear. 

They make you look now at
the shape of your baby rage.
They intervene in time.
Your feelings are a symptom.
The threat of poverty & prison & homelessness & murder.
They show you the tools they would torture you with.


Thus the industrial academy
not only best arbiter
of discourse but rainbow bridge
time machine transporter slippery slope
between Bohemia & the middle class,
a reversible prophylactic.
IT ALONE LAMINATES.
It is the vessel inside
which we have agreed
that the radium of poetry
is best protected from itself;
all we ask is a bedbug snuggle in the folds---

as the economic circumstances
which encourage Bohemia have faded
from possibility
so too has the memory
of their former vigour,
history being written by the owners of horses.

They make you forget that it could have gone either way...
 
Not so much a split then
between the campus
& the coffeehouse
        but a flower of pure heresy--a real floater
in the patriarchal bowl
embarassing & antithetical
autodidacticism self-correcting
bibles with red protestant pencils
jutting from their spines
never beloved by
the people with guns & horses. The glamour of the Romans
marched ahead of their armies. The wise Hungarian boys
wanted in.

Thus Sibylline
neighbor wrestles with starting
the collectible collective chain-saw
Texas massacre style. But for no woman is the shadow
of the Imperium ever absent or
the rumbling engines silent.
 
So Max for decades sans the benefits of the kind of
eccentrically overproducing
alternative steady state personality
apparatus that keeps bissett going
& sustained Gerry Gilbert for decades
Tim Lander & me for that matter
hiding behind our beards our city. 
Wearing out our knees on the welcome mat
& as boys we get to do that.

but we never get to say

me thinking to kill whoever speaks to me

just like a woman, not in a woman's voice when
there was still a chance heresy might bust out & take over,
the winds of Vatican 2, Prague summer,
Roberts Creek...  In BC you could get away from the state
by walking uphill barefoot for ten minutes
--the British Empire hates mountains
as much as the Romans did. Build a fort on
the lip on which the sun never sets
& keep those good snacks &
drugs & trade goods coming.

We congratulate ourselves for even trying
our good thoughts & a
Dollar store resembles the interior of a bandits sack.

Babies as weapons for Mother Canada.
Dog on stun.

THE HEAVY METAL DIAPER GET SET READY TO GO

not even feminists
have agency
without a society
to quit

So from here on in the gendered
rejection of Satan & his works
seems a pretty clear choice.
Pride the first indicated voice.
Speaker not keeper.
Ignore the thickening local ghosts.
But the beats were as scared of Peggy Lee
as everybody else. Uniformity of conduct & sweater
mad men how even as men
can we imagine it. Hippy fascism.
Waldorf Willendorf.
Postwar /////

For if yv diddled in the truly amusing the king jumps yu

Dicks working out there shit with chicks
in a very entitled fucking way.

Bail on even as much of this
life with father figure fascism
as what sugared the rim
of the rapidly organizing poetry apparatus
& you do get privileges: 

One is you get to jump off the
whole whig history train,
unshackled by utopic kiwanis klub
pinko bullshit
or future shock payback
or death on the installment plan. 
But the long line of heroes is not up to you
& we'll still give you up to the cops in a heartbeat
& no you can't use our library
& you're one of the greats but
there's a coffee filter burqa
I'd like to wrap around your head---

but everything still gets to happen at once
so the nineties of saddam
the sixties of mailer
& the noughts of oh say thomas fucking friedman
vs the placebo syndrome

PERMISSIONS you out NOW
FOR prophesy

"places people can take you & put you"
writes Max in the nineties
remember? the happy ending of history
with full release? WHAT COULD THE LIARS PAY?
In the absence of assasins
In the neural networks of high tech
shining path star-whackers--


mind your wants
cause there's someone
that wants
your mind

(george clinton)

 
less discrete weave
of shiny life
folded in twee boxes
than inconvenient stops on
the Mandelbrot skytrain,
unsurprisable ghosty
unusurpassably bubbling up
every exchange
AGITATED PRESYSBYITARIAN  VOLCANIC SUBTEXT
the void of conception
residue
of a swiping hard thumb
race against metastasizing facts
otherwise
Lost to Language---