Post Colonialism
The Magog Grill and Detoxification Port appears as a wild-west
facade, no more than a story, riveted by non-union carpet-tackers
to termite-rotten two by fours. Up for the shoot, but down
in the duration - today packed with Masonic tradesman, Nestorian
missionaries, mercenaries from the Khmer Rouge on loan to
a neighboring Caliph (dealing with some slovenly "dissidents"),
various sentient polygons - tomorrow a brand new cast ...
I order a double shot of kumiss, on the rocks, warned by the
bartending-ape's brute dialect about the singeing texture,
the geopolitical burn. "It's common sense really. I've
got a deal with a Keshmuri glass-bottler on this shit for
export as, get this, virility tonic ... liquid manifest destiny,
shit damn ... " Dustbunnies roll by like tumbleweeds.
The Super Bowl plays perpetually on a giant projection television
inside an art-deco manger scene. Beatnik Joseph has got a
fish-story Fu-Manchu and gets a frankincense rim-job from
a sweaty, animatronic Melchior. Somebody's always getting
tackled, and Vince Lombardi looks like an extra piece of shrubbery
in Waiting for Godot. A hologram of baby jesus cries cries
cries before ascension ...
Sputnik
Follow the riders dancing like Bacchus into sylvan groves,
madcap figures skulked in dawn's eponymous curtains. But you
come upon only carcasses, cadavers, for your brethren, all
breathing, not dead yet dying ... ichor replaces blood drips
in colors of some spectral, lunar alchemy. Movement smothers
sound. Scent leaks out to the points of twisted horn and the
fumes of a thousand flours, ten thousand garlands of twigs
and thorn, a million husks of rotting caterpillar and centipede
fuse into the lemonade-wind of summer, that sweet gingernumb
season in the oral crook of an empty satellite.
Report from the commission to the committee.
The film snaps patterns and perceiving these, I experience
my perceptual pedagogies for the chain-gang demographics.
Do the realities of economic policy imply that about half
of Shakespeare's chemicals are responsible for the disappearance
in reverse time of fin de siécle culture - music, videos,
foreign policy, and other special effects? By far the major
Freudian series imposed by the White House lobbying laws add
that reading my text, a rationalist bracket in the South Bronx,
the public feels lost in the distinction between arm-grabbing
products and the over stagnant air of Woolworths. Authenticity,
birches and maples. The wheels in ditches, the birds, and
the contest organized by the objections to multiculturalism
anticipate severe-weather orgasm sirens on planetarium canopy
snowbounds, goose downs, rabbit linings, blue-dwarf visions
of that text interrupted. The copy of the US also varied in
merit, but beat out a host of others animals set equally against
the naked city laundromat. They know I'm not really eating
Kashmiri-style robes and headdresses. Why the copy used by
the printers approved religious differences, frozen in liminal
space of course, to protect the small child resembling a water
droplet which tele-link parcels of instrumental years with
each President and call my parents, stop the film - we're
phonetic collaborators all right - every first one of us.
Davis Schneiderman is Chair of the American Studies
Program and an Assistant Professor of English at Lake Forest
College. His creative work has been accepted by numerous journals
including Fiction International, The Iowa Review Web,
Clackamas Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Diagram, 3rd
Bed, Diagram, Quarter After Eight, The Little Magazine, Gargoyle,
and Happy. He is co-editor of the critical collection
Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age
of Globalization (Pluto Press, 2004). Dr. Schneiderman
is currently co-editing an anthology on contemporary uses
of the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, as well as co-editing
the new literary journal Potion.
