[Newspoetry] Derrida Dead At 74

[William at Spineless Books]

"the situation"

Assassinations, kidnappings, beheadings, raging barbaric guerilla war, 
Americans attacked 87 times a day, terrorism, chaos, mayhem. The day 
Darleen A. Druyun and Martha Steward went to jail, Afghanistan's first 
presidential election collapsed. The opposition to the U.S.-backed 
candidate claimed the ink washed off easily.

In the dictator's cuff disappeared his military might. He had not touched 
a phone in a decade. Rather than chemicals, his armies melted into sand. 
Armories evaporated, sublimated to barns. Not a mountain of ice but steam. 
Something you could never roll a tank over. Our armies would strike from 
the sky like lightning? They put our spears in the ground. Your enemy can 
never finally defeat you unless they can pay attention to you. Hear.

There is a new problem in language. Evasion is erosion. Those who will not 
listen can say whatever they want to, addressing nobody. The dictator 
recognized that. The armies of viruses would spread even after his 
capture. He knew we wanted the oil.

There are few moments in history that crystallize the contradictions of 
the reigning paradigm. I am referring here to the symbolism of these 
attacks. September 11th demonstrated that in the end America speaks but it 
will not listen, even when shouted at.

Iraq has developed into a two-front war: the battles for control over Iraq 
's cities and the constant struggle to protect its far-flung petroleum 
infrastructure against sabotage and attack. The first contest has been 
widely reported in the American press; the second has received far less 
attention. 

Though there are those who go beyond the dull shapes of these sentences, 
people of relentless precision for whom intelligence is usage. do facts 
exist? Truth is not a rock, it is a path, a hermeneutic of verification, 
authority, credulity, but there is no penalty for speaking shadows where 
ideas were extracted.

Truth is not a rock, it is an explanation of gravel. It's in these shadows 
that their shredder hums, straining the fiber from the milk which feeds 
the teleprompter. A team of men with combs lift every adjective and dust 
beneath to remove shards of meaning. Smoke rises to the pyramid's tip.

Language rises uncoiling from the hot orange fact.

William

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