Tuesday Poem: "Lament for Lost Literary Comfort"

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 pissed?

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 anal fixations of Herod are?

It’s got so bad I deconstruct a holiday brochure.

I can’t even fart without Roland Barthes and Ferdinand de Saussure.