I’ve been doing a lot of work to get the seventh issue of my zine out. This one’s going to be a compilation featuring myself and five other poets. I’m still putting a good chunk of my own writing in there, for the people who are getting it for that, but I also wanted to feature some other poets whose work I respect and like. Today’s poem is by Richard Wehrenberg, who will be featured in the issue. This is the first part of a three-part series that will all be in the issue. It’s good!
ideology (1)
quite frequently i have visions
of ‘capitalists’ and ‘anti-capitalists’
relieving themselves, so-to-speak,
of their animosity towards each other
in the form of two or three of each type
huddled in a quiet apartment with a dimmed lamp
massaging their genitals together like bonobos do,
reconciling their disparate ideologies
in this sexually rudimentary way,
collapsing the binary of themselves
by coming together like this.
i am seeing them in this environment
as though through plexiglass,
like some jane goodall-slavoj žižek
amalgamation with glasses and clipboard
taking notes like—
friedman mounts marx
with determined facial expression
or chomsky and goldman,
after heated ‘foursome’ with rand and reagan,
share some oatmeal.
and of course, if you construct a category
you will find people to fill it—
you will be able to tuck them in tight
and tactfully assign them ‘essential’
characteristics and expectations—
you will reduce them to necessaries
and sufficients, causes and effects,
essence before existence—
but when we speak of each other,
let it be of our innards, of our collective
biologies and consciousnesses, of the mutability
and clayness of our days, of the pieces of each other
we have gifted away and taken in simultaneously
to be made a part of our-loamy-selfs,
to be made a part of (and here, i cannot resist positing this)
our hearts, those overworked and rusted signifiers,
which we seem to have shackled, which we seem
to have assigned straight-jackets for the times
when they have raised their pickaxes to the layers
and locks we have bricked around them
to chip away, however slowly, at whatever
myths, presuppositions and simplifications
we might have made up in our relations.
i have been imagining myself waking up quietly,
emptied of fallaciousness and facade, insistent upon
identifying the totality of our epoch and dismantling it,
re-positioning the tiny truths that remain into every
mud-crack of my step, every trap-door of my syntax,
until it becomes easier to love each other again.
