The Present

“to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible.” – Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
 
To see the object
As in itself
It really is

Curious find
Free play of mind

Hello sloperator
Can you give me back
My dime?

Cosmetic

“Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored.” – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). 
 
Vaudeville koan 
Mendicant song 
Nothing embellishes 
All, all along. 

The red and the black 
Supernatural life 
Framed in a coal-barb 
Abyss looking back 
 
Fire on the cheek-bone 
Priestess’s flame 
Kindles the gleam 
Inferno of eye 
 
burning burning burning 
as hellish fire 
of distant stars  

The Dandy

“What then is this passion, which, becoming doctrine, has produced such a school of tyrants? what this unofficial institution which has formed so haughty and exclusive a sect? It is first and foremost the burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties. It is a kind of cult of the self which can nevertheless survive the pursuit of a happiness to be found in someone else – in woman, for example; which can even survive all that goes by in the name of illusions. It is the joy of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished. A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer; but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.” – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). 
 
Exquisite lion, 
Incredible corpse, 
Skyscraping credit 
For want of a coin 
 
Behind my grin 
It gnaws inside 
Away away 
 
Paperthin I 
Flutter 

By 

Modernity

“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). 
 
I miss the days 
When Midas Kings 
Trembled before God 

And as their grey hairs 
Curled with age 
They wept with fear 
Of camel-pin hell 

And grew expansive 
Gregarious 
Huge as laughing 
Singing Ghosts 
Of Present Now 

And laundered 
Bloody capital 
In hospitals, galleries, libraries, schools… 

In the midst of the fugitive

“Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted – or rather written – by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the Crowd? In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasurably absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion! […] The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” – Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). 
 
Separate myself 
Dig and fill the moat 
Build the highest wall 
Drown until I float 

On the other side of this wall 
There is no one at all 
On the other side of this wall 
There is nothing at all 

Separate myself 
Such a lonely place 
Cut away from all 
A king of all this space 

On the other side of this wall 
There is no one at all 
On the other side of this wall 
There is nothing

To Bloch

“We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not a decisive one.” – Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). 
 
Blake out 
Close the cage 
Clip the wing 
Rake the rage 

You are born to sweet delight 
All are born to endless night 
I am born to fall in flight 
All are born to endless night

Capital

“Capital that has such good reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stock-jobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi, le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.” – Karl Marx (1809-1849). 
 
Spin of the wheel chips on the blaze 
Double or nothing to raise up the stakes 

I’ll buy in to play 
And fold right away 
Be on my way 
And with the 
Bluest chip 
On my shoulder 

The one armed bandit has folded his hand 
Slam on the button funds draining like sand 

I’ll buy in to play 
And fold right away 
Be on my way 
And with the 
Bluest chip 
On my shoulder 

I’m feeling blessed fortune favours the brave 
The hand that is dealt shakes me firm as the grave 

I’ll buy in to play 
And fold right away 
Be on my way 
And with the 
Bluest chip 
On my shoulder 

Spin of the wheel chips on the blaze 
Fire alight to burn up the stakes 

I’ll buy in to play 
And fold right away 
Be on my way 
And with the 
Bluest chip 
On my shoulder 

Grundrisse

“A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.” – Karl Marx (1809-1849).
 
I am becoming 

The lady is clothed with the sun 
I am whole when all’s undone 

Spread your destinies and bear 
Down to me to eat the air 

Becoming 

I am 

Manifesto

“A spectre is haunting Europe” – Karl Marx (1809-1849) & Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).
 
I can lie here still as stone 
I can crush a pelvic bone 
I could climb the lion’s throne 
I prefer to sink alone 

Bare, bare my teeth. 
North and South.  
Up and down 

Hear, hear your feet.  
Pound the ground. 
You’ll be found 

I can lie here still as stone 
I can crush a pelvic bone 
I could climb the lion’s throne 
I prefer to sink alone 

Snap, snap my jaw.  
Ancient Law 
tooth and claw 

Wait, wait my turn.  
Wait and learn. 
Must return 

I can lie here still as stone 
I can crush a pelvic bone 
I could climb the lion’s throne 
I prefer to sink alone 

Composition

“But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required – first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness – some under current, however indefinite of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning – it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of the theme – which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists.” – Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).  
 
Test Shot Teddy Bear 
Wake up unaware 
Face pulp pink air 
Wake up die there 

Notorious 
Glorious 

Test shot cattle bar 
Contact salmon spar 
Clean killer clown car 
Tire track black scar 

Notorious  
Glory us