esprit | fall 2004


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Cover Photo

Awards
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Submission Information

Because I Love the
                  
Woodchopper's Ball:
                   A Blues Sonnet
Scream it and Scram:
                   A Blues Sonnet
Wrinkles
Comfort
Seas and These
Seasonal Affective Disorder
Word in Words
Adam
A Lilliputian Script
31/2 Parrots
Jihad
Sparkles
Occlusion
Mother's Cradle
Me against the Music
Arash
Sex Appeal
The Poet's Brother and the
                   Language of Asperger's
Trinity
Together
Einstein's Afterlife Postcard
                  
m=E/c2
Our Skin
Poetry

Front Cover:
Central Park

Inside Front Cover:
Suicide

Inside Back Cover:
Peace

Back Cover:
Samsara

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Me Against the Music

 

David Fine

 

   hey Britney

Cultural detritus
falls unnoticed. Philosophers
nibble at big ideas,
quote high art. They
turn off the radio, alienate theories from reality
TV. Yet
while priests polish silver
and the learned rub bourgeois backs
(conciliatory to their dollars, ever
assuaging their dreams)
popular poets craft consciousness.

Their creations bomp, bump, pump
from the boom boom
boom boxes
of the uninspired, spew
from the BK-have-it-your-way TV sets
of the banal. The children gather at Britney's feet
to listen: With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride.
You're toxic. I'm slipping under.

An ontological underwire
props up Britney's bustier. She starddles
a man in her underwear
in front of thirty thousand people. Nothing
comes from nothing: with a taste of poison paradise,
I'm addicted to you.
My sisters
watch an incarnation of the death of God.
Don't you know that you're toxic?

Aristotle's not the only one with a metaphysics;
listen to the music:
       you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals...
                     living in a material world.

Call it kitsch;
call it shit;
just don't call it irrelevant.

The time has come to chase her out of the city.

  


Submissions and inquiries:

Esprit
Room 221
McDade Center for Literary and Performing Arts
Scranton, PA 18510
(570) 941-4343

 

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Page last updated: Tuesday, 02. August 2005