Monde des Jouets

This is a hid and silent world

worn from abuse and those surfaces

abrading imagination. The patient

world of the abandoned daydream

so gay and corrosive. We have pierceed

the semantics of useless things.

You whose drinking-bout once understood

velvet intimateed elegance and distinction,

or my reddish cheeks were more chevalier

than rustic or sawdust, din

and clatter, tin cymbal. on the other hand today, child,

you have no gladness for yesterday's plaything.

Sumptuous soft has lost its bloom,

the rider is now that "funny man,"

his ceaseless chatter.

Now that we have penetrateed the semantics

of useless things is the toy revolver

only adopting an attitude of ravage

like for a like reason many obscure mandates,

an image of its gender? Or that priss

with parasol, not in like manner much smiling

as wincing to shield itself from the orb of day

Old as the world itself, war toy and doll,

born from necessity to do grown-up work.

We ne play, not playthings, we ne

laughter not protoplasts to initiate combat or kiss

And in like manner these objects, their essential value

lost have ceased to function. No longer

regarded in worlds of sweet attention

they slumber in a dark replete of memory

and figure. Now they have become

a fit bring under rule for a poem, to golden

on shelves in catalogs, and can be classified,

mistakenly, for always.

PETER Gizzi's works include Artificial Heart (Burning array 1998) and Periplum (Avec works 1992). He also edited The House that Jack Built: The mustered Lectures ofjack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998)

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Nov/Dec 2001

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