| ... |
At Uncle Etienne's Next Wave Call-In
(a.k.a. The Rolling Thunder Psychoanalytic Review
and Evaluative Gestalt Therapy)
I answer the phone, ready for anything
In between, I play songs that sound like
Stereo digital recordings of
rubber bands and dental floss pings and pluckings
My latest salutation
["Hello? Hello?"]
prompts a sleep-induced and phlegmatic guttural response
["Eck, eckkhah!"]
that parts to reveal a voice which says,
"But what I'm asking, man, you know,
what I'm saying here is that, man,
I need to know where the bathroom is."
I recall my walk to class one afternoon.
I suddenly had a realization of what art is, what theatre is
All I had been taught,
All I had learned,
All my experiences
converged in one moment of blinding truth.
I saw the meaning of it All
in that moment of Enlightenment.
I stopped walking and mumbled the word "shit"
the opposite of that sublime truth—
And the truth was so obvious,
Why hadn't I seen it before?
Just then, someone—
a relic of the sixties
hanging on to past memories
with no present
and certainly no future—
bumped into me
and said, "excuse me, man."
But I couldn't.
With that small bump Enlightenment was gone.
Truth was gone.
The light that had dawned—
I lost it.
I continued on my way.
I saw on a brick wall, this graffiti:
"Art is dead."
Below it someone had written:
"Poor Art."
Someone else:
"Long live Art."
Another:
"Fuck Art! Let's dance!"
And yet another:
"Who's Art?"
And in parentheses, below all this,
in bold capital letters:
"ART FOR GOD'S SAKE!"
And speaking of existentialism
did you ever find
while sitting on the toilet
a roll of toilet paper with absolutely
no beginning? |
... |