[Newspoetry] Compulsive Behaviors, I

[Donald L Emerick]

BREAKING: Yasser Arafat Pronounced Dead in Paris
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111204Z.shtml


If I see a headline, I read it many ways.

Sometimes, I notice no impossibilities --
it all seems insanely abnormal, unequivocal,
speaking like -- well, like no text of man --
but speaking like me, intent on clear meaning,
as if my words sprung from my head, in beauty,
Venus on a half shell, Zeus-mind, made-up-real.

Take 'Arafat pronounced "Dead" in Paris.'
Did he speak in a French accent, mais oui?

It is no accident, when id leaves its scent,
like a drunk who has pissed in public places
to mark them out by his own homeland traces.

How did this tone-of-death pronoun
speak unto Arafat, tone-dead: 'tone it down?'
Pronouncements speak when nouns turns pro,
hiding shadows, cementing over ground below.

Derrida said, of late, what Kant cliched
in speaking of a newly pronounced tone
to be found most in philosophy's words,
which are broadcast at its grave sites 
(on 030448.x FM, if your radio spooks
voices from ethers beyond hazy hazards).

He pronounced "dead"  -- erect monuments
to the moment of his speaking unsayables,
and mourn truth that passes in the night,
passes itself off, passing itself away,
passing itself into lasting passivity,
a permanent plasticity of a common clay,
a figure to be molded, taken literally.

It's good, so I would surmise and infer,
that he did not pronounce "Dead" in here,
and it's bad, too, that he did not say
something else and much more than "Dead,"
of the evil yetser Yasser always fought,
to deep fry in Arab fat, like chitlins.

I've ground the ground beneath my fee(T)
into ground, grown down on groaned don,
a poem is an accident in accent history.