kitsch | A Second Life

42. A Praise Song by Sarah in Honour of Paulina

You are ferocious, Paulina as you are maimed
You are the source of delicious pleasure, kitschy & sincerely false
You fuse the fire of intent with incapability
You ignore all tenets but the right
You are never commonplace yet totally familiar
You are what is next
You are starting at 15.29 as a novelty act
You are an important relic of our trash
You are welcome, despite all your damage & your disorder

Yes! You are harsh as bones, as peacocks & our laughter
Even on your stick, you will outlast your friends
Once, you were what we chose
To our delight, you continually make up incomprehensible rules you order us in vain to follow
In all things, though you deny it you improvise
To say it again, you need to be exploring
In truth, you are the Empress of Xi
Poets say you are our warning
As society started, Paulina, you instructed us without words
stuck dumb upon your stake

34. Behold Our KitschN;-) Gods Displayed

My head, the head which is not, the head of ancient liberty, staked on a traffic cone, my head which remembers always sundogs shining in the south‑western sky, my old head reads that scabs are rats, my head reads that art will fight & flourish, my head can never stop splashing & shaking. All excesses are mine.

Oh, my fingernails, the tokens of laborious growth, my fingernails scratch the text beneath, rearrange it as a game of go1, my fingernails exceed my flesh, they rake your flesh gently, & excited will pleasure you, clicking w/ laughter.

Ah, my mouth, the mouth with which to eat & talk, inhales, exhales, the nameless mouth, the mouth of disgust, the mouth that is tight & keeps its own counsel, unpredictable & cruel. More is more divine, says the mouth, less too, more blue.

What do mice2 do? Happen in amazement, stuck to this big conceptual mess. Blue & red modulate to grey & pink. Areas of white flourish variously. Don’t trust what you can’t bite or write.

1 weiqi

2 are you really saying this is a bear?

33. Speak Easy

Let’s talk about familiar things
unconstrained & exhilarated how we go
letting things write clear
after all that splashing about

no one can do this alone
it’s a matter of rushing together
oh dear little kitsch of dancing through
bound together now w/ laughter

we have at last learnt this is a cruel world
and we swim within polluted language
constructed carefully to keep us down
– OK then, children, let’s smash it all

what do dreams do? their joy corrosive
to the big conceptual mess – oh yes to
ordinary mongrel colours, nothing high end
but delicious too, then much more real