Pavement for a Dead Princess

In sorry dress stages they rehearse the third act
of Aphrodite. studio castings. long shadows down streets lined
with visible eating disorders filling empty beggar cups. ladles of procreative
gruel sloshing over the sides and down through the lines
of succession, to be served bullion cubed from both ends
in robes of silk and sorrow, bloomless guns, triggerless roses
for off-the-rack cherubs dining on mothballs,
an unsettled debt, doubt hanging in the closets of celebrity,

reminiscences of fathers reenacted, mother's stooping, weeping,
mothering, the light-meters hovering, intestinal contents of auto shrapnel

for contrast insertions into frac^tures of story-boards
revealing associative play over the appetites of interchangeable,
expendable units of desire that entertain themselves with
transmissions of fabricated oprahlence. The chilD now father
of a ghost in skin of bag bones

What drives this hunger— the tent cities
of soup bowls, glass flies, supply-sided gift wrap? A cramp? A purchase order?
A few hundreds of milLlions of charlie horses flinging
themselves into the wire racks at check-out stands, tiger balm?
High-stakes communion, land-mine wafers of charitable deductions
adopting poster children from Brazil, Bosnia, Calcoota, Des Moines,
shut-ins ordering take-out plastic surgery for digitized faces
on a stage of vast unpopulated social architectures?

bag bowls of soup bones rattling in stooped knit dresses

"Psychologically healthy people have no need to indulge
fantasies of absolute power; nor do they need to come to terms
with the reality by inflicting self-mutilation and prematurely
courting death. But the critical weakness of an over-regimented
institutional structure -- and almost by definition 'civilization' was over-
regimented from the beginning -- is that it does not tend to produce
psychologically healthy people." - Mumford, 1966.

Marilyn 1926-1962.       Diana 1961-1997.

On a planet of charnel houses -- the law on the bullion, the light in the tunnel
looks for tennants. A posthumous vacuum dance responding
to some need for settlement by inhabitants fit for the occupation
of unbodied domains, ordering up greater than life replicas
of plastic saints with which to populate the crèches of state ,
create demography, till landscapes, planted rows of institutions.

Corporations-as-persons fits the bill. Ghost templates for the expanded
image bag bones of actors spouting philosophy to athletes rolling out
ethics primed for the image rising to the surface, an umbra becomes
the ordinary citizen construct operating the machinerys of cost-benefit
analysis, due process by terrorism by due process by supply&demand
warfare fed from longings from below - new titans on the surface
of the world

new orders feeding on street-lined appetites folded into vapors
of instant communication, now talk to one another in stooped
languages arising only from the architecture itself, from its walls
the spigots upstream pouring children into street bowls lying in
state aware only of the passing of human seed,

organ constituents buying magazines, massive heart-failures
that stage events, speak SpectacLE receive purchase orders for photo-op
story-book models of grace to gratify the new structures
of condo eurodollars, west-end east-end regiments over casting calls knocking
bag bones into soup bowls/where the knit on the sari said, "sorry."

"Harrods...Haute couture?"

"Not this time, ready-to-wear will do fine."

© 1999 red slider. All rights reserved.