Poems for Infidels

Our Remarkable Lyricism

77 Our Remarkable Lyricism Fuck you, you jive punk-ass motherfucka! Get the fuck outta my face and take yo silly little bitch with you! —Miles Davis 1. In Los Angeles, we etch the unfailing signs of our enchantment by means of a tattooer’s needle. Here is Jesus’ foreskin; here are the bleeding folds of cloth we call the flag; here is the dragon, Humanity, come to end technology with her breath. Miles Davis, the movie beauty’s shoulder says. 2. One day in Picasso’s studio, Andre Breton fixes his attention on an extraordinary canvas with a large blotch in the center, quite like the excrement of children who’ve eaten cherries with pits in them. Picasso was going to put a few flies on top to show it was shit really, a word that Breton prefers not to write down, of course. But then later Breton, thinking about the remarkable lyricism the flies would have added, finds himself taking a particular interest in the artist’s representation of that which is not assimilated. 3. Like tenderness. The starlet should have slender Arabic swirls ascending each leg, each tendril topped with a half-open eye— thigh-level, we etch the unfailing signs of our enchantment. (Miles Davis, says her ear, festooned with fish spines.) 4. And beyond that, it’s the people, then the pigeons, then the rats. Here in Hollywood, it’s every unassimilated instinct for its self—and the love of lyricism past. ...