Contemporary Puke

German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London
 

Page seven - I've had enough of Being and Time

and of clothing. Many streakers seek quieter locations

and Marlborough Road's unreasonably quiet tonight.

If it were winter I'd be intellectual, but it's Tuesday

and I'd rather be outside, naked, than learned -

rather lap the tarmac escarpment of Archway Roundabout

wearing only a rucksack. It might come in useful.

I can't take any more of Heidegger's Dasein-diction,

I say as I jettison my slippers.

When I speak of my ambition

it is not to be a Doctor of Letters

or to marry Friedrich Nietzsche, it turns out,

or to think better.

It is to give up this fashion for dressing.

It is to drop my robe on the communal stairs

and open the front door onto the commuter hour,

my neighbour, his Labrador, and say nothing

of what I know or do not know, except what my body announces.

 

I step out into the street and a puddle meets my feet,
a puddle not of rain, but of hypodermic delight.
Where are you off to?
says a bobby, slapping my bare hind.
I'm reminded of Coach Diddle,
the way he used to pat me so.
Cats in the alley sing a dirge in honor of fallen human knowledge.
I feint a nod of approval.
Oh, the humanity, such losticiousness!  
 

And thus I find myself,

with the bark of the Labrador,

clobbering that bobby around the auditory devices

with a copy of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy.

I do not think better.

Cold snakes encircle my wrists,

my feet are muddied by the puddle,

as the bobby says,

"Anything you say may be used..."

I blank out the rest, too focused am I 

on the sight of a crow ensnared in the 

plastic handcuffs of a pack of coke.

I feint a nod of approval and ask the bobby

for pen and paper to make a note of the moment

for a later poem.
 

I am located to a maximum security cookie jar by my friend in blue.
A prison of both the body and the mind.
But especially the body.
Speaking of bodies, the inmates googol at the still nude mine.
The tried method of quoting Aristotle proves ineffectuative.
If only I'd equivocated my paternal,
who vocated science would make a better mistress.
Gentlemen, let me be frank, I say.
Frank, you're gonna learn to butle like a butler, say they.

'I find your discourse quite frank,' I say.

'Who's Frank? Why do you keep talking about him?' they recall.

I tap my ofalctory device, driving them insanier.

The bobby, too, is spiced by this.

Ah, my great teachers, how you would be proud of me, 

for I have stumbled upon the lynchpin to my freedom.

Behold, it is not streaking, but Frank.

I bargain with the bobby.

He is easily won over, the mystery of Frank burning

his seat.
 

Blackmail and bribe, working together
for a colon good.
Mayhaps the Germanians aren't so bad.
In a my the house home apartment
I now streak only
in the
closet.