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Levi’s Straus
by L.S. AsekoffWhen Tel Quel’s darling entertained
Jackbooted sons & daughters of
The Emperor of Opera Hats,
Louis Napoleon,
At the Socialist salon
In ’68,
His razor wit guillotined
The thinking from the feeling part.
Constructing a frequency chart I found
The words most often employed:
Langue, bouche, l’invisible
Lacan, libido, & repetition
Which in super-maoist semiotics
Seems to mean
Something like “rehearsal” as
The fiasco of ‘05
Was a dress rehearsal for
The reversals of
’17.
Below, the rabble & the paving stones
Inherited the street
While the Head of State ascended
Loudspeakers in the trees,
Choppers from a cloud
Or disappeared into a maze
Of plexiglas visors, shields.
Behind teargas barricades
My Fulbright days &nights
Overflowed with manifestoes,
Flesh-tinted pinups
Of revolutionary whores & heroes,
Color photos of napalm
& the atom bomb
Until I couldn’t tell ground zero from
Vagina, ear or anus
As I confessed, in a weak moment, to that prick,
Von Kramm,
Famous paperback & talkshow advocate
Of electroshock therapy
Gentially applied
In the defense of the aggressive tendencies
Of homo capitalismus, who is,
From my perspective as
Participant-observer in the race,
An innately nasty creature
& a human worm.
Years later,
Doing fieldwork in the Adirondacks
I discovered a Puertorican pearldiver
Flash his firehose – ca-rum-bah!
& on day reading Honey & Ashes on the can
Began an on-the-spot investigation into
The morphology of the hand
That blows the nose
& the hand that wipes
The shitty grin.
Contributor
L.S. AsekoffAskeoff has published two books of poetry. He directs the MFA Poetry Program at Brooklyn College.
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