How the Artiste Tackled the American Buying Public on Oprah

How the Artiste Tackled the American Buying Public on Oprah,

Only to find the American Buying Public Candidly Indifferent to the Day

To Day Struggles Behind the Commas in the First Year of the New Dawn

of a Century

Barbie® denies ever saying she can’t get it up

and she doesn’t mean her kick-

stand.  Her mojito is dry,

her reading is criticized, but Barbie® thinks text

a dead issue and author overrated.  

She has structured a difference engine 

to calculate phonemes and close the psychological aspect

of the syllable to the post about a fencemodern artiste

in Impressionistic times.  She counts sand as band-

width and speaks of tribes and community while speculating

on the veneer of Ken’s shins.  He has shaved his head in emulation

and lives for a French accent that sounds authentic.  Or, at least,

French.  What’s so hot about Ambiguity, Allusion, Allegory and

Amphigony anyway?  One of these things is not like the others

and Barbie® knows what’s what, just not

what’s hot.

She counts her fingers:  why only seven?  

Why lonely power?  Ken’s been acting the fool again,

spitting discourse like a mermaid –  Barbie®’s willing to bet

there is a theory for that, too – counting his urns and pays,

being paid by the gerund and feeling the mapled pressure

of the quarterly publication deadline of a small private concern

“Dedicated to the preservation of a contextual spirit

reserved by and for the free-thinkers and harp-blowers

who call pen and paper home.”

Balderdash, texts Barbie® in an IM to Ken, absolute

poppys’cock.  BRB!  XOXO!  C U Soon!  

Spirit descries this hawk’s path around the para-

gliding graph anent the glyphs, eating apostrophes for appetizers,

commas and colons as comme ci, comme ca,

tri-syllabics as main courses,

declaratives for dessert.

Passion gets lost in the minutiae, Barbie® thinks, 

dissection the surest way to destruction.  

What do you call an Indian summer when all the Indians

are dead or absorbed?  Acclimation

to text versus intention versus style

versus declamations of lack of responsibility

for words penned in autobiographies.  We spit

on the windowsills of the lives around the shuttered panes,

considering breaking and entering as an entrance behind the posted

façade.  Too early to say what’s new, or borrowed,

what’s old, what’s blue if not a shadow of a mermaid’s

lost foot:  it’s either Berlin, or Madrid, never Rome,

never London – the four found corners of circles 

not recently traversed.

Barbie® says her city is going around in flames,

not up or down but treadmill fashion – 

revolving to get to where you were

before you were here so you can

come back here again and again

endlessly in l’esprit de l'escalier.

Remember when no one knew you and you wanted

everyone to know your shine?

Illuminant revelation:  Barbie® never takes a dump.  

This forget, like a sweat not breaking the skin,

lingers in her toiletries and is pasted on all of her covers

to behold:  a no-trespassing sign with an open gate

and a hobbled gait to the register.  Sing!

of the cha-ching of the drawers unless Barbie® slums it out

on the late night circuit to bemoan the horrid fate

of the artiste trapped in a day-time network drama.  

Ken can only sigh.

We are far removed from close

reading, and movie rights

aren’t what they used to be.

Every great culture suffers decline

with an entitlement of envy, and comfort

and contrast arrive only in the form of prideful

succor or sloth.  Spit!

Into the mise en abyme if you dare,

says Ken, but we are inextricably tied,

spliced a-twine like the well-wrought

earned dime that is our name

synonymous.  Barbie®’s on a binge,

bloating about Capitalism and the work

hour and what’s an honest day

anyway and an RC Cola and a moonpie:

Those ramen noodle afternoons were armchair eras

coming to a halt though who could predict

Barbie®’s predilection to the babies

of the white stuff?  600 pages,

plus 60 pages more, plus yet another 300,

give or take a suspect acknowledgement page here and there,

with a facetious epigraph torn from an imaginary orator 

of the Roman court:  before eye for an eye, there was karma,

reaping and sowing equally.  Scream!

but Barbie®’s mouth – like her asshole – 

is permanently sealed, a pasty

above-and-beneath-it-all-simultaneously grin

leaning over her dirty appletini at the bar

where theory and pride both go to atrophy.

This husk of an ego, she thinks,

will be the death of every sentence she

ever dreamed, and in her nocturnal sweats,

she is pursued by the delete key,

bungling along behind her, erasing

every beautiful letter she ever dreamed 

sending.  She wants to go back 

to Missouri, and Iowa, and Illinois, but only so 

she can conquer the big city

all over again.  Ken understands:  what

do you call an Indian summer when

all the Indians are dead and absorbed, 

what but rewind and nostalgia, history

now as rewritten intention.

Barbie® reads stall walls, reaching

for toilet paper she will never use

except to scribble another missive to the self,

sordidly suitable for the flesh and flush

of a well-honed handle, polished

to the blush of a practiced protest,

she doth too much.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved