The Whole Lacanian Universe

After Josh Strawn

http://www.jewcy.com/post/defense_zizek

Reading about Zizek's latest
critics, all dim antagonisms
of a more practical psychoanalysis:
this is what it means to be without;
this is how the bird becomes
lighter than its own blue feathers,
even when the air is thick with
snow, hail, and shadows dancing
due to dull ropes and sharp blades.

Rousseau's dreams once led on as
textual sprawl, bugging out
from the inside, forming trails
of slick muck, but now they are
only references—love poems
dipping black feelings down
around what happens in the skull.

Fascism, and too the new left,
wait patiently on a high setting, and
suddenly all these political games
seem like a hauntingly choppy brew
worth stirring up, even though its
all worthless—to see the dust clouds
form into passing shapes, heaps
of layers piling up, my mind thick
and stale, my gut burrowing into
its own thick plateau deepens my
frown, shuts everything down like
a scarecrow or a lost lover realized.

There will be battles upon battles,
we seem to say to ourselves, again.
And a sense of blood, and footprints
sloppily scattered across the sidewalk--
these things just shadowed qualms
leading on towards an iron door, while
all of our dirt-covered change lies loose
in each pocket, summoning strength
and a long string of disabled moments
through each single, heavy piece of metal.

The Hegelian-Lacanian world
of ideas for me is just a series of
red and purple thought-spindles,
existing like jump ropes only one
or two early-evening curfews away.

Time is a ball bouncing and made
entirely out of thick plastic; yet still
we snap at its bulk with our scissors--
we attempt to cut those cheerful ropes
that we once played with but have
set aside, even though they are still
lifelines, and we utter useless babble
to sickening, deadly audiences while
squeezing our three digits together.