Photography,
Photo journalistic,
Everyday, realistic.

Commercial, architecture, landscape, artistic,
Industrial, fashion, ethnographic, pornographic.

Big Brother, fallace, stealer of souls, vouyer.
News seller, instant gratifier, man pleaser, woman abuser.

Barthes, Sontag, Cindy Sherman,
Virginia Woolf, Warhol. Weegie, Francesca Woodman,
Leibovitz, Adams, Arbus, Tina Modotti,
Nan, Evans, Hoffer and even the Paparazzi.

Cheap *****, digital manipulator, image poser,
Center fold, coupons, Jackie O and Marilyn Monroe.
Where did they go:

Lifeless paper product, painter's picture mess,
C-type, digital archival,
Sepia, black and white, hard drive retrival.

Image addict,
Image taker,
Image maker,
image seller,
image buyer.

Newspaper, magazine, graphics and ads,
TV, dreams, even the trash.

Billboards, subways, phones and buses:

Utopia:
Surreal, crop, stretched and air brushes.

Modern ideal.
Surface manipulator.
Brain conditioner.
Consent manufacturer.

Oh Photography,
I got you in my eye.
A few thousand dollars,
A BFA, A critical scholar.

Or maybe a nerd,
Just boys with toys.
Telephoto genitals, with motor drive action.
Studio lights, umbrella traction.

Oh Photography,
You proprietor of obscene.
Detailed, de-sensitized.
Court ordered, jury analyzed.

Click, image, copy, edit, paste, print or post.
Myfacespace, twitter, flicker,
An internet media overdose.

Pry, spy, your friend's friend's acquaintances.
Parties, picnics, reunions and shows.
Visits, vacation, style, shoes and clothes.


Pics, photos, images, jpegs and giffs.
Snap shot, portrait, panoramic, Kodak kiss.

Exacerbate:
Divorce, break-ups, jealousy, envy, love and fears.
Devour and captivate society for years.

Slaves to Western and Capitalist desires,
Destruction of Earth with psychological, monetary empires.

Once I looked to the Bard for words profound;
ageless, his wisdom ran unabated.
Yet Hamlet is now ideologically unsound,
“the slings and arrows” historically Iocated.
I wept for the creature of Frankenstein,
spurned by his master, forced to roam the Earth.
But I’d been subjectively positioned in a paradigm
by Mary’s anxiety about childbirth.
I read Balzac, Hardy and Henry James
describing “worlds” which seemed quite sensible.
Now Eagleton’s exposed their bourgeois games
I find them morally reprehensible.
I dreamt of being Robinson Crusoe
or proud, fierce Hawkeye in his buckskins dressed,
but Fenimore and Defoe have to go,
they’re culturally encoded and empirically obsessed.
Inspired by Guinness, did James Joyce sit down
to see what magic flowed when he was ******?
The stream of Ulysses floats Bloom-about-town
dreamthinkingnever : “I’mamodernist”.

I’d gladly give Woolf a Room of Her Own
and be one of the boys with Hemingway,
but sensitive guys leave their bulls alone
say de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray.
No more fun with Wordsworth being daffodilly,
no simple pleasure reading Mickey Mouse;
Steamboat Willie can’t help but look silly
dissected by Foucault and Levi-Strauss.
The Bible shows intertextuality
says the two Jacques, Lacan and Derrida.
Judas, a construct of bisexuality?
The **** fixations of Herod are?

It’s got so bad I deconstruct a holiday brochure.
I can’t even **** without Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is
as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip
of my words. My language trembles with desire.
-Roland Barthes

My* language is a skin I have outgrown.
It sloughs off in flakes,
leaving letters or the occasional
ill-suited, illegible word
trailing behind me.

I pick at adverbs and articles
hanging from my fingertips;
This morning I pulled a whole phrase
off my arm like a sunburn.

My language, once alight,
now settles like cinders
on the ground,
around the shower drain,
upon my sheets;
My language no longer serves me.

Peel my vocabulary off my back,
tear my diction from my shoulders,
and my syntax from my chest;
Scratch the punctuation off my face—
my lips are chapped with parentheses.

Tomorrow I will have shed my language—
Unbound from an ill-fitting lexicon—
coughed the alphabet from my lungs
and exhaled the last serif
like cigarette smoke
to find the world new,
uncontained and undefined.

you read faulkner and it turns my stomach.

but i like when i find you devouring my books--

i liked the time i found you curled up with my copy of the poisonwood bible
and you stuttered apologies for the marked and highlighted pages,
for the notes in the margins,
as you explained you had become engrossed in the story
and forgot it wasn’t your own copy after all.

i like when you talk about barthes and foucault
and try on literary theory like glasses:
horn-rimmed new criticism,
nice round reader-response theory.

i like when you touch me
as if i were the delicate curve of sylvia plath’s bell jar,
as if you know that i am at once suffocating under pressure and
suffocating myself,
as if you know that all i need sometimes
is the singing of your fingers on the glass
to give me harmony
and air.

i like when you pick up the poetry collection i bought at the bookstore down the street
and translate marina tsvetaeva's verse back to its original tongue.

and you never say it in english, but я люблю тебя
has crossed your lips, dangerously,
before you started teaching me russian,
before you found out I knew enough of the language
to translate
that.