UN COUP DE LA DIALECTIQUE

My wife is in the bedroom wiping dust off the face of a stuffed Teletubbie—the one with the Lacanian center protruding from the top of its head. My brother with his construction-working gorilla sausage fingers wrapped round my narrow neck tells me water seeks its own level. In other words, we are poets because we’re lazy. I tell him all poets are indeed lazy and want nothing more than to project this laziness onto the world—that is, they map their desire onto the world around them by means of critiquing it. They inject this desire into the consciousness of others in much the same way a radiologist injects barium-meal into the rectum of a patient—uncertain where the cancer resides but having a hunch it's there, the art of resisting Wal-Mart lies in the search for this cancer. As auroras expose the landscape, the process of the poem exposes whatever cancer may or may not reside in the patient. It draws the cancer out. It is a critique of cancer. It makes of the cancer a beautiful thing at precisely the moment it identifies and condemns this cancer. Experts are uncertain whether barium itself, which allows us to view this cancer, is itself cancer causing. This is the poem. This is itself a material manifestation of desire. Like a muddy puddle, the economic ground we throw this desire against reflects the image of our desire back at us, but also transforms and distorts this desire, which is always already distorted, which is busted up before it comes back to us like a boomerang in the form of a fucked up, static image. This is desire.