Manual Yang: Seven Poems Copyright © 1999 by Manuel Yang and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Poems Manuel Yang Anti-Aesthetics for Bourgeois Times This window of signification that Magritte never drew breaks crumbling under the force of pistols shaped in heaven's statuesque crimson. The roads are blasted, the soldiers shoot blood, and the lines of ashes are as forgivable as fenestration committed in two. I recall a time . . . did I say "a time"? The ancient tortures are long forgotten, battles never finished, and what "time" is there in this cycle of crash & balderdash? Immobile and memorialized, the gasoline screams isolation & takes away the only dignity I haven't got. Nothing doesn't come from nothing. Law of attrition. The age--any age--doesn't only does not need another hero, Yang 2 Copyright © 1999 by Manuel Yang and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 it does not need another genius either--it never did. We were just spellbound by the spirit of the times, a mistaken conjugation. But if the rulers are bad cooks, why do we still eat their food and call it "great"? Why do we keep on dining on our own flesh? Hank and the Old Moor Nightly, in his old age, after a day at the racetrack and while cracking a beer or rolling a cigarette or sometimes nothing, Hank wrote many poems on his Mac, watering his words like he and his wife fed their cats. Was there a method, a strategy, to his productivity, his endless dances with words, that lasted until he drew his last breath? The old Moor died in his chair, already the memory of Jenny and his boils approaching a receding point of grave infinity, and, of course, he, too, wrote much, with the tip of his pen dipped in hope, doubt, & tragedy--and not necessarily in that order--for what is Das Kapital but a long, irreconcilable, unfinished drama chronicling the death & rebellion in the heart of the beast? Yang 3 Copyright © 1999 by Manuel Yang and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Hank, to be sure, did not like this bristling & monumental poem, calling it once "dry, very dry shit," but, between Hank and the old Moor, apart from their industry & stature, they possessed two things in common: recognition of work as shit and a will to write from the perspective of those who do that work. A Benediction for Fundamentalists Playful, christ-ridden bastards in a wave of feigned desperation take us over like flood & alcohol, from freeways & airports, post offices & TV stations. Worse than bitter almonds, they are tortured animals seeking blood in the form of installment plans & mortgaged offerings--loan- sharks for God disguised as an equal-opportunity invest- ment bankers for salvation. No insecticide will kill them, only encourage that anti- Malthusian dictum of theirs that is more Stalinist than the pen-pushing CP bureaucrats now out of fashion. Christ, grant us the patience & poison to wrap these genuine Sodomites in scalding brimstone & annihilating fire down the valley where the sheep eat their excrement and fuck their masters for free. Future in the Present Dream of revolution, a shade of violet, the coming catastrophe, nothing but silence, a feverish wake-up call running through the streets, Yang 4 Copyright © 1999 by Manuel Yang and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 figureheads broken in the bonfire, accidents break out without conspiracy, pure chance smashed like an exploding glass of wine, the splinters make the barricades. Rats escape through alleyways choked with noise & tender deaths. All the empires in grief come to naught. My identity is that spiraling star witnessing the strobe lights of history's clipped nails dispersed in a hurry. Never to fall, never to forget. The sweet, eviscerating silence. They come, these sailing dynamites without words or message. A tortured tree in transformation grammar of irreversible baptism of machine guns, shooting up my comrades in the grace of chaos. I arrange no crown made of olive branches & leaves. The future is not yet stolen from us. razor-blade tastes like the sun razor-blade tastes like the sun as i lop off another ear for a whore I have sanctified in the church of my dead dreams. i try to signal feebly, blindly, to the traffic lights strangling my eyes, crossing hawthorne and about to go back to a house roasted with suicided flies and battle- worn bedbugs, the noise of smog and blood and alcohol as another day of grease, death, and machine dull my hands & eyes Yang 5 Copyright © 1999 by Manuel Yang and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 from thinking anything except the thud, crack, and clang of belt-conveyer smeared with the refuse of work, as i continue the transaction to modern times chaplin knew fucking nothing of. NATO in New York The miscegenation of intense light & searing bombs began again last night. So principled are such pauses of sharp desecration before sleep moves fast for the throat. My soul, which is sky, has forgotten how to dance, and I need some intoxicants to confirm and convey these cut-and-torn varicose veins of gnarled streets I call, without hesitation or silence, home. The return of the angry native. Not these runaway's dream again. I cannot celebrate the city. It is too full of days smashed to joyride flames & banshee brawls, meanings all tucked away in a flash of a switchblade. All our bedlam neighbors are sipping arsenic on measly social security checks. My discontent. Curses. Decrepitude. The city is dead. As I am. optimism of will passion and revolution come like lilies burned at the stem of a dying shepherd's lullaby. Yang 6 Copyright © 1999 by Manuel Yang and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 all the bad language and marxisms we incinerated in a drop of a forgotten manifesto shall not rise again with swift incantation of apocalypse or sudden kiss but with bled hymenal flood of anguish and beauty scorched from the belly of this monstrous whale whose intestines we have eaten, spat out in blood, disillusioned and calcined from dead prophecies remembered, folded, and burned.