iloveshitlikethis

Imagine, that we were just

our bones –

all milky white and

solidsmooth,

stripped down to the core,

the essential, the bare minimum.

No fleshy barrier

between us,

between us and the world.

Just, bone

next to bone –

ribsclaviclespine

crownscapulahips.

Every illusion shattered,

our sins white-washed

in the chalky glow,

sacraments consecrated

in the space between

marrow.

Katie DeCantillon

So how do we live in this world of “post-industrial society” and “multinational capitalism,” as Fredric Jameson puts it?  What are the fundamental implications for everyday life within the postmodern framework?  To begin with, this “logic of late capitalism” marks a new phase of human existence in which we have become naïve of history.  The 24-hour news cycle is often just that—we forget the things that happened more than 24 hours ago.  Without the metanarrative, society has been thrust into an oversaturated melee of advertising, “news,” and “culture.”  When Jameson refers to the “logic of late capitalism,” perhaps he means that under an economic model where the impetus is to consume, consume, consume, that it is no wonder we lose our identity.  If the things we buy define us, then by definition we become those things.  And who wants to be a vertical stack washer/dryer combo from Home Depot?  The endgame of incentivized identity construction though advertising can only be the mass obliteration of metanarrative, can only result in the stranglehold of the media and the mega-corporations and the Walmart cultural paradigm.  Jameson laments the recent murder of high culture at the hands of mass culture; he contends that we live our lives ever immersed in the present for the very specific purpose of forgetting the past.  The modernist dream of the “infinite advance of social and moral betterment” has rusted like the bustling factories that inspired it—replaced instead with the sobering realization that we may in fact be infinitely advancing into the smog-choked darkness of the postmodern gutter.  

But I’m optimistic.  Soon (please God, soon…), there will be an anti-postmodern movement.  Just as the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot and the refreshing psychosis of Ezra Pound were visionary in their active rejection of the tacky conventions of the Gilded Age, and just as postmodernists subsequently found the modernist rebellion to be watered down after its publication in textbooks, so too will a new generation of thinkers emerge from the shameful muck of our time and present us with another version of subversion. 

It’s 6am and I’m racing trains down

Dekalb Avenue,

dodging the early shift commuters.

That one is going to an office in Alpharetta,

and that one to a hospital in Midtown.

I’m going for a lap time.

Two minutes thirty around Oakland Cemetery

to the cheers of the infamous dead.

They wave as I go by,

jealous

that I can’t sleep.

stuck in the rain on the freeway, 6:15 p.m.,
these are the lucky ones, these are the
dutifully employed, most with their radios on as loud
as possible as they try not to think or remember. 

this is our new civilization: as men
once lived in trees and caves now they live
in their automobiles and on freeways as 

the local news is heard again and again while
we shift from first gear to second and back to first. 

there’s a poor fellow stalled in the fast lane ahead, hood
up, he’s standing against the freeway fence
a newspaper over his head in the rain. 

the other cars force their way around his car, pull out into
the next lane in front of cars determined to shut them off. 

in the lane to my right a driver is being followed by a
police car with blinking red and blue lights - he surely
can’t be speeding as 

suddenly the rain comes down in a giant wash and all the
cars stop and 

even with the windows up I can smell somebody’s clutch
burning. 

I just hope it’s not mine as 

the wall of water diminishes and we go back into first
gear; we are all still
a long way from home as I memorize
the silhouette of the car in front of me and the shape of the 

driver’s head or
what
I can see of it above the headrest while
his bumper sticker asks me
HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR KID TODAY? 

suddenly I have an urge to scream
as another wall of water comes down and the
man on the radio announces that there will be a 70 percent 
chance of showers tomorrow night 

Charles Bukowski

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Sharon Olds

The girl on the rooftop stares out
over the city and grips a cold revolver.
Laundry flaps around her in the hot night.
Each streetlight haloes a sinister act.
People are trapped in their beds, dreaming of
the A-bomb and hatching get-rich-quick schemes.
Pickpockets and grifters prowl the streets.
Hit-men stalk informers and crooked cops hide in churches.
Are there no more picket fences and tea parties
in America? Does no one have a birthday anymore?
Even the ballgames are fixed, and the quiz shows.
Airplanes full of widows circle the skyline.
Young couples elope in stolen cars.
All the prostitutes were wronged terribly in childhood.
They wear polka dot skirts, black gloves, and trenchcoats.
Men strut around in boxy suits, fedoras, and palm-tree ties.
They jam into nightclubs or brawl in hotel rooms
while saxophone music drowns out their cries.
The girl in the shadows drops the revolver
and pushes through the laundry to the edge of the roof.
Her eyes are glassy, her hair blows wild.
She looks down at her lover sprawled on the sidewalk
and she screams.
A crowd gathers in a pool of neon.
It starts to rain. 

Nicholas Christopher