Copies of copies:  Every year there is a "Forgery Art Show" here on the Island.  This is a forgery of a Basquiat that I am considering entering (and it's priced at only a fraction of the 11.5 million that the original Basquiat recently resold for!).

By Basquiat

My Version

I am tired so let me just offer this one poem:

Theoria

(a prose poem sort of poem, critical reflection, short story, and alibi by Daniel Imburgia)

“No ideas but in things...

to make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means”

(From “Patterson,” by William Carlos Williams)

“A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds....The rhizome is a map and not a tracing....What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.” (A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, pgs 3, 12.).

(*note the following is a true story regardless that my accounting of events is an artist’s representation of what beg to be called actual events (even though we are limited by present instrumentation and have no way of confirming that there actually are such things as events).

I.  Quiddity

Like a bungling assassin the delivery man came

My beloved wife tosses the package into my lap 

“Another book?” she says with a critical tone

“I thought we talked about this?”

“It could be our prescription pills form Canada” I reply

“Or a Christmas present for you!?”

Not to be put off she waits for me to open the package

“Yep, another book” she says shaking her head

“What you spend on books could feed Seattle’s homeless”

This cuts deep into one of my weak-spots

Exposing yet another facet of my hypocrisy

One of the tall piles next to me is mostly books about social justice

Radical dis-possession, Marxism, redistributionism, post-colonialism

Next to that pile is a small forest of books on ecology,

Climate change, exploitation of natural resources, indigenous rights

Bridging the two piles is Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”

“Another book of theories I suppose, like you need more theories?”

“No, look, it’s a book of poetry...Love poems even, by Bell Hooks”

“Bell Hooks?”

“She’s a post-modern philosopher, feminist, professor, poet, and...”

“Theories” she says, “theories about love aren’t the same thing as love.

Maybe you should order a book on curing your ‘Book Addiction,’ and yes I see

The Irony in that,” she snaps before I can even think of mentioning it

(I could have pointed out that she may have technically misused the word ‘irony’

which has its roots in the Greek comic character Eiron a

clever underdog who by his wit repeatedly triumphs

over the boastful character Alazon

I just happen to have Wayne Booth’s excellent book, “A Rhetoric of Irony,” 

right here at my fingertips and.....)

II.  Roscellinus

“Who’s that poet your’e quoting all the time” she asks, 

“The one who said, ‘Not Ideas but things?’”

“Williams” I say “He wrote that poem you liked about the peaches”

“Yeah, like he said, you need less ideas and more actual doing”

(*Note to reader* That isn’t exactly what Williams wrote.  He wrote:

“No ideas but in things,” which, ironically enough is itself an idea...

But he said it in a poem so he could have meant almost anything

Or nothing, who really knows for sure?)

But I take her chastisement seriously, this is a woman who once

Rode on the roof of a bus through rebel territory in Guatemala

Her big beautiful black hair blown straight back, looking much

Like the jungle warrior goddess Maria Lionza  

She was terrified--but she stuck

She didn’t flinch when teenage government soldiers

Pointed U.S. made M-16’s at us

Or later when Marxist Guerillas stopped the bus 20 kilometers on

She just smiled and blessed them

Shared her water and chocolate with them

No ideas but in things

But not all the borders between doing and thinking are so decisive

As the walls we imagine between communists and capitalists

Rhizomes spread beneath our monuments into no-man’s land

We make our lives under the canopy of the Arboreal forest

So our metaphors are too much of trees, trunks, branches, leaves,

Platonism

But here now, let me share one of Bell Hooks love poems

I dedicate it to my wife and let’s see if she will forgive me the cost--

50.  by Bell Hooks

a heady heavy love

speaks my yearning

calls me

to give my all

and seek the place

of no return

to lay bare my heart

for you

to whom i surrender

to you

for whom i wait

III.  Hypokeimenon

Hook’s poem speaks of

Yearning, seeking, baring, surrendering, giving

Are these things love?

Or are these things ideas of love?

Imagine that poem being read ceremoniously 

At a funeral, or better yet at a wedding

Suppose a minister having power invested

Pronouncing men+women/women+women/men+men

Making them all spousal of some sort or another

One flesh, one body, one desire,

Made to be one fluid of multiples

A kind of miracle if you think about it

Yet it’s as easy as the ABC’s

One minute you’re a fetus and the next you’re a baby

One minute you’re a child and the next you’re an adult

One minute you’re single and the next you’re married

One minute you’re innocent and the next you’re guilty

One minute you’re alive and the next you’re dead

One minute you’re body and blood, the next you’re bread and wine

And it’s all concocted out of everyday speech

Just by breathing in and out and

Moving tongues and lips around in different ways

Or making jots and tittles on dried animal skins or light emitting diodes 

Ordinary old signs, phrases, phonemes, sentences,

Familiar and customary, publicly shared and traded

Established, orthodox, mundane, even tawdry or hokey

(true, these signs are regulated, established, and disseminated

Within the matrix of a 3 trillion dollar military industrial complex)

Nevertheless, they are laying about for anyone to use

IV. The Magnetic field and ‘The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.’ 

But of course there are always a few untamed and unbranded

Signifiers that escape enclosure and administration

Clones and bastards, fabricant traces of rhemic sinsigns   

Fleshed-out and mis-begotten runes

Forced through cleavatures like running wounds

Where the hensible is incomprehensibly re-born 

Sympodial things that can’t be bought/sold, lost/found, loved/hated,

forgotten/remembered, spoken/written, hidden/revealed   

Binaries that can diverge without any change in appearances

What we used to call the Sacraments, holy bridges  

Crossing the borders between provinces or even whole worlds

Before empires dominated the spectacle and discourse 

Back when we huddled together around open fires telling stories

When the fire itself was a telling

When we could still make things up for ourselves

And each heart bore witness to whatever words were spoken

We all kept our secrets together

Backs hunched against the same cold darkness

Because we knew how to face each other then

Reflect heat and light from the power of our gaze

Our souls singing within the circle of each others eyes

Before truth was a thing with angles

Before every book was a book of mourning

Accounting for all that has been taken from us

For all that we have lost and surrendered

Being and seeming to be

Without thinking about it

Imagine that

Thing

Obliged.