Let's talk about your butt: celebrity
fitness trainer David Kirsch on how to
shape and tone your backside. . . .You
stroll alone through the scorched earth
desolation of a war they never teach in
schools. But my eyes can only see the
beautiful reliquaries adorning every
tree and cloud, and the birds that swim
through syrupy atmospheric seas low
above the asphalt shining silver in the
impossibly clear and vast, transparent
morning light, while every flickering
leaf sings to me a thousand songs of
the secret joy they've buried under
what they've persuaded you is life. In
the end Warren thought it had been a
lost cause, but that's only because he
didn't know how Shiva broke the
unmanifest into an illusion of time,
tick-a-tock, tock-a-tick, it doesn't
really matter. And there are no dirty
words, not really, only commercial-
soiled minds, and Jesus rode into
Jerusalem, and when he had found a
young ass, sat thereon. . . .And you
can be borne upon an ass, or you can
fall upon your ass, it doesn't really
matter; it's only a rounded mass of
muscle and collagen and fat, after all.
20090818
The Ass
Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
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Frankly, I couldn't help inwardly giggling in comical delight(or is it delightful comicality?) from the very first words: let's talk about your butt. When you read something like this you know that either what follows is going to be nauseatingly vain, pointless and needlessly vulgar or a very fine and fantastic intellectual ride. Guess where my affliction for this work stands. As always, your presentation of the splendiferous beauty, shunned or elusive to the common eye, is moving and vibrant. You start the poem with a cosmic metaphor(I do hope that is a metaphor) and follow that track of magical and fantastic imagery straight to the end. Leaves singing, birds floating in syrrupy seas(pollution, I reckon) and that's just a start. Then enter Eastern Philosophy, the time is bended, warped to finally take a back seat on the plane of perception. I'm hardly acquainted with the Eastern philosophy but time as an illusion is something I would readily agree, or at least agree to this as a pretty solid and plausible hypothesis. Actually, I try to imagine Everything as an elaborate machinery where every second and minute in every nook and corner of every universe has long since formed and is segregated, as in a document locker with a firm padlock thereupon, unlocked only potentially by the prying eye of science.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that you connected the beginning- where reliquaries adorn the manifests of beauty surrounding the speaker- with the ending vision of Jesus sitting upon an ass, which is of course so comically ambiguous and in fact, the ending description of muscle, collagen and fat might mean both the animal and the rather taboo bodily part. Through the comicality and humor of this odious metaphor, however, one can see the 'ass', perhaps, as the symbol of genius and perception merged into one to create the capacity to discern the colors, the shivering atoms, the illusionary milliseconds and each individual fabric of the Whole, the kind of capacity that, according to the speaker, Jesus Christ acquired during his life and which we all, with time and strained training, can come to possess. In two words: comical && interesting.
"Let's talk about your butt." I love the audacity of this opening line - it caught me off-guard and I loved that.
ReplyDelete"An illustion of time; tick-a-tock, tick-a-tock." This was my favourite part. I don't even know what to say. The 'tick-a-tock' line is currently playing on 'repeat' in my head :P.
unfortunately, the opening few lines were lifted verbatim from an advertisement that burst upon my laptop the morning i wrote this one in an attempt to reclaim this somewhat taboo word for all writers in all times. synchronicity. not sure how a bumper can become taboo in the first place.
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