Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

con the young into war for their own craven delusions these slugs

(I mean bend over, America) (I mean who profits? Look in the bushes!)

ice sheet melt and toxic goop etcetera etcetera war profiteers

that threaten to dissolve our bindings the maimed the sick

generations of children lost to neglect and apathy

what'll we do? Describe it? Discuss it? Crazed

with recognition we have moved to detonate our revolution

with ancient new genre DYSFIC!!!! Our kisses cauterize

sear away descriptive, discursive formulae dead words

can never give tongue to this experience these feelings DYSFICcharges

language artists to emancipate language into the mystery and power

at its source in heart and cosmos the conventional assignment buries

reality in a casket of illusions DYSFICis evocative, incantatory,

ecstatic not the image in the mirror nor the scene through the window

the work is to smash the mirror shatter the glass as they distort

DYSFICTIONSare anti-narrative they are dysfunctional, dysrational,

dysengaged they are politically and emotionally dyslect can be

dystasteful and DYSFIC is dysorderly, dyspontaneous, it is manifest

even though it is dysqualified and dysallowed dysprovisational

though in its structures it may exhibit form exquisite

as insects in a laundry often composed at randyom

DYSFICSare quick and clueless as persistently trivial as they are

relentlessly profound DYSFICis always composed through a system

of exocharacterization and psychological outrisme (this doesn't mean

fuck-all, Mesdames & Monsieurs, mi dispiace) i.e., elsewhere characters

live in their books, grow, lust, murder their children, survive brutal savage

childhoods in various ethnicities, breath salt air by the shore, keep pet

alligators in the tub, fuck up the lives of their closest friends, despair of

satisfying their grandmothers, pray for a breakthrough in their diets,

conspire to sell nuclear secrets, but none of this, not a word of it,

ever manifests in a DYSFIC dysfictioneers grant release of brief

chuffs of steam from the eyeballs the writings resist closure, encourage

dysclosure dysfictioneers know that within every closure plumps

an efflorescence any dysclosure clears the track to THE END

DYSFICSnever begin come nowhere to an ending be the perpetual

middle of things intrepidly spiritual or dyspiritual depending on field

of play you read as you do at breakfast the cereal box or casually

while you wait for the tech to come back on line or while you rest

in your attempt to get back into those tight jeans (prescribed years ago

in a different poet's manifesto) however you wiggle to compact

the flab years have wrought you'll have to face up to the DYSFICS

presto-chango DYSFICTIONis right now and beyond

DYSFICa fly on the nose of a theorist cabbage in the throat of

gender narration and bland gruel of sexual preference DYSFICan ethnic

gollywobble as one of its affections DYSFIC embraces dyscombobulation

and silliness as no serious genre has dared and by doing thus

eliminates the pejoratives of those categories such an erasure is in the nature

of every embrace to embrace is not to embarrass we mean it we love you

Samuel Beckett's entreaty that we yield not to the distortions

of intelligibility is proudly flown on the DYSFICflag

Grandmothers suffer. Their daughters married in haste. The granddaughters never marry. Won't grandmothers marry again? Maybe. She scans the obituaries in the morning, and when she spots one cut loose by a dead spouse, she grabs him, i.e., a grandfather. Then the pair enters a house with heaps of comfortable shoes, crushed oatmeal boxes, moth-eaten sweaters pressed into bricks, family portraits piled up, tea cozies stuffed with petrified scones. Grandpma stack memorabilia to make a wall perforated with antique bottles. Luminousity of Coca-Cola past! It's not what they need, it's what they've used. They fill the rusting RVs of their histories with spent lightbulbs and flatten them. What a crunch, almost a noise. The grandparent of all sounds. Of this stuff they fashion a roof over the head. Don't ask how. It's a lost art. The glitz that packages our software makes excellent doors for them. They don't need to exit anyway. Not any more. Out here? In the alleged world? Why should they? The granddaughters never marry. The daughters married in haste. They shingle all this with plastic bags, thicknesses of them, so to shed the rain, and then they go in to live it out in it, i.e., life.

Whilst they complain, let them know the sun shines anyway, though maybe not so amiably as when they once enjoyed it, but it shines down these days. If they complain, tell them the dogs bite, and the bite is worse than the bark. When they complain, treat them to a meal deal. Take them fishwiches and double Big Macs. Ply them with elevator music. Take them suits of polyester. Take them mairzy doats, and doazy doats. Take them an electronic brain. Ask them to show off the Lindy Hop, even the Mashed Potato. Take them a rasher of plutonium. Take them Wittgenstein, Einstein, Gertrude Stein. Take them science and philosophy, heaps of it. Take them Whitehead and Russell. Remind them of Santayana. Make them shoot hoops. Make them play big time. Take them Miltown and Prozac and etcetera. Ragg Mopp. Take them a red-nosed reindeer.

All the delights of their own devising, take them. Take them Elvis Presley in the form of an oral vaccine. Tell them life is as good as what you make of it. Take them color television when they complain. Take them Carmen Basilio. Take them Alfred E. Newman. Take them Jimmy Rodgers.

Jean Seberg gazes into the rooms where her grandchildren entertain their guests. In one room Baudry has set up a small theater, three rows, five seats to a row, and there he screens for three of his friends, aficionados of the cinema, herself starring in Breathless , then appearing as Joan of Arc, being burned, actually burned at the stake by Otto Preminger, who got what he wanted out of his actresses, then in Paint Your Wagon , pretty as a Hollywood babe. They watch these movies late into the night, their eyes reddened, tearing. One might think they were weeping. Wipe your tears , Jean Seberg thought to say. Don't cry for me . Then she thought, Why not let them cry? I was beautiful, and mine was the saddest story .

Thelin, in another room, reads to his wife and a couple they met on a cruise to Iceland. The text is Jean Seberg's deposition at the FBI hearings on the Black Panther Party. Although the other husband has fallen deep into the velour asleep, it is evident from the expression on the face of the two women that they are moved, even shocked. Don't be so surprised , she wants to say. It could happen to you. Just expose your upraised palms once to the winds that fly from these buildings . But she doesn't say it. This is not her voice.

Mercurey in the third room is undressing for her lover. That lover is one of the many lost granddaughters of Alice B. Toklas. How can they be lost? Jean Seberg doesn't know what to say to this. She wants to sing, maybe. She wants to understand everything. She can't resist peeping.

“I had no children,” Jean Seberg asserts. “The grandchildren are an illusion, and they never marry. I am an illusory grandma, and my illusory daughters married in haste.”