FAILED PANOPTICON
Across time we come scuttling mysteries
Piston mouths, vomit and fight.
My ancestors line up by a ditch.
I can tell you’re the “almost you”
febrile, unspeaking, unless
behind a screen
or the porcelain mask (a hideous relic).
You float on doves
tearing paper from your throat.
You want out of this pastiche.
But are we still flesh enough?
I lean back inexplicably hard flowering.
There’s a line forming between my collarbone and the Pier.
A wind blows up from the desert and salts
In the photo you were standing at the exit of a metro.
A wave transformed by frozen traffic.
I couldn’t square it with your professional temper
the perennial storm
or with the Rauschenbergs you show us.
But we’re all less than the things in the arches
on catafalques in moonlit cathedrals
– each in lieu of an original we represent.
Only death
they say
is real or a promise or metrical.
Consumed by this tactical interlude
Cobain’s soft ghosting
fragrance washes over us like hair.
David Roden has worked as a Lecturer and Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. He is author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (published by Routledge 2014). His work has addressed posthumanism, philosophical naturalism, cyberculture, deconstruction, the metaphysics of computer music and new realism. He blogs here.
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