Negative Theology

When in a definitely designated and defined location,
I desired to be someplace else,

Because
I could sense

I was no where, I was constrained
And confined

In a location that had no existence, was only
A myth, a lie.

But after a scrutiny of my community
And the communities adjacent and not too

Far away, I empirically observed, my observation was
Something like the observation of a path
In a subatomic structure as described by Heisenberg
In his "Principle of Uncertainty," that my community,

Adjacent communities, and communities
Not too far away

Had no real existence. These communities
Were people, unknowable and vague, whirling around
Something that was not a center, but something unknown.

Since I was confined to being nowhere,
I desired ardently to be somewhere. But it was

Impossible, for there was not any where.

---

IT HAS BECOME TRUTH BY CONVENTION
RATHER THAN BEING TRUTH


In a simulated Spain near Orlando, I sat
In my ambassadorial
Clothes,
She in her Ophelia dress.
This Ophelia
Dress modeled on the dress Ophelia wore
When appearing
In a painting and floating on shallow water
Among
A scattering of wax flowers during Lent.

This simulated Spain was a marvelous Spain.
The marvelous Spain the surrealists sought
In their seeking of the marvelous.
This simulated Spain was the best Spain
That money could buy.
Imported from Spain, chefs, dancers, kibitzers,
Beggars,
After the esurient entrepreneur made a study
Of Nietzsche,
He had manufactured a gored matador.
There was a mechanical flamenco dancer
Whose tapping
Of her high steel heels
Always created an aura of Duende--
Although her technique was faulty and praised
With its destabilization of the traditional rules
And her interrupted narrative.
The mechanical dancer was vociferously applauded
When the machine unsettled the illusion
Of subjective autonomy and conscious control.

As we sipped simulated Spanish wine whose grapes
Were grown in the northern part of North Dakota,
We were joyous
Because we had rejected
The notion of individual subjectivity
As unified and stable.
It was wonderful sitting here in this simulated Spain
And not believing in anything.
We were so happy that nothing could disturb
Our happiness, not
Even
The sad couple at the next table,
The couple who still believed
In traditional values and the old verities.

We, two, had cast off our masks of social identity
And were hilarious
In our enjoyment of the Heideggerian notion
Of the multiple and temporal experience of Being.

We, two, decided to tango.
We tangoed over the border into France,
And then tangoed over the border into Italy.
We in Italy,
Gripped each other so tightly
In a lustful embrace
That we appeared to world as being one,
As we did
In a simulated Sorrento
A tarantella.

---

THERE ARE NO PREESTABLISHED RULES
TO DETERMINE CRITERIA FOR THE CREATION
OF POETRY. JUDGMENT OF THE VALUE AND MERIT
OF A POEM IS MERELY A SELF-INDULGENCE
IN BLIND EGOTISM

Lava and ashes, red and blacks, were brought
Into the den
By a remote camera and a nearby screen.
So the unevenness of the evening
Became a Hula dance of light effects.



A professor who looked like an allegory of chaos
Done by Bernini on commission from Cardinal Borghese
And Michelangelo's Moses who already had broken the tablets,
And now was dripping gin from lips after sipping
From the tits of a golden cow whose batteries
Generated a "Moo," and then erased the sound
To send out a bark into the noise of conversations
And of a man who in the corner behind a potted
Palms who was reading aloud the constitution.

"Let us remember that circa 33 AD Paul
Was converted. Michelangelo painted
A galloping white horse as beautiful
As an apple tree in bloom, "
Spoke the hostess who stunned with her hegemony.

The poets present were pasting words
Freshly cut from dictionaries and still alive
Over the mouths of vases and watching
The words wilt and become skulls.


A philosopher was doing subtractions
To substantiate with marks on parchment
A sense of loss. He switched to a discussion
Of art, elaborated on saying the unsayable,
Verifying the unverifiable. His last words
Before passing from over-indulgence
In orange juice and vodka were that all speech
Was the struggle to say what cannot be said.


"We must remember two teachers, Simon
And Cleobius, among the Corinthians taught
The invalidity of the Old Testament prophets,
The God the consensus accepted was not
The true God, a mistake of an unknown material
Created the world, Jesus was an apparition
And a metaphor, never a physical man,"
The hostess with a charming motion of
Her lower arm, remarked to a portrait
Of an ancestor on the wall.

The lava red with flashing lights of vermilion
Was now flowing over the gray lava from the previous
E-
Ruption.
The scene was a background for a pornography movie
In which visual metaphors for coition were
The turning of a water well, the turning of a spinning wheel,
The turning of the wheel of Fortuna, the large tires
Of a race car going three-hundred miles an hour,
The legs of a greyhound in motion as the greyhound
Chased a mechanical rabbit.

After a long discussion, moderated by the hostess,
Now disrobed so the false appearance of clothes
Would not distort the truth, about how only the
Freeing of the artists from the community and
The language of lies that people speak constantly
In their daily lives will open the artist to achieve through
A counterforce the somewhat diminishing
Of the evils of the community and their traditional values.
The artists must not oppose, but surmount and
Overlook the community and their banal narratives
That destroy truth and the values of genuine life.
Above all, all those poets who due to their
Greedy opportunist appropriated Carl Jung
And diluted his views for popular consumption
Must be abolished from the Republic. Book
Ten of Plato's Republic was cited.

The discussion was long and all alcoholic drinks
Had been consumed and the floor was piled
With empty bottles, the poets all decided
To conclude the discussion with the resolution
That nothing could be concluded, and
All, including the naked hostess, sat down
To play Bingo.

---

Nietzschean Irrationalism In November

It was curious to feel cursive, a feeling
Like being the curlicues of a curlew's bill,
But a series,
A configuration,
A connection of curves.
It was like being rhizomic with
Effective pale roots, twists of
Of a neologistic cathedral invented
To worship a decentered self
In the center of a circle, the community and who
Has subdued the power of the circumference,
The community
And has the feeling of being with a companion,
Of being stroked by a lover,
Although alone with plenitude,
Although present is a lack.

When discrete and disparate events
Are added up the sum is the wrong answer.
Refusal to fix meanings in January
Lets the moon in March become a white bird
That flies across the tongues of oranges
And stops the speaking of crinkled, canned words.
Silence gives birth to flesh and a fetish.

The autobiographer is a fantasist.

---

"THE POEM IS AN ANSWER TO A QUESTION
OR QUESTIONS NO ONE, INCLUDING THE POET,
HAD THOUGHT TO ASK," ANN LAUTERBACH,
SLAVES OF FASHION.


She knew the ritual, the rite. It was to cease
Looking ahead,
Getting a vague glimpse of a vague destination,
Seeing the leaning of black smoke curves
From a straight, cylinder-like, but perceived flat,
Or something bubbly and domelike
Like fallen, colored raindrops, the frosted flashes
Of neon through fog.

Before, what is called "objects," but objects
Are transformed through observation.
Orisons turn objects into orchestras.
What is declared "overt" perverts the polis.

Orpheus with his music could stack stone on stone,
Build agoras. With his music, Orpheus could tame
And subjugate wild animals into carnival entertainers,
Into the feature dish of a feast.

Opheus could through the lyricism of his poetry
Build walls for a garden, a garden with goldfinches.
Orpheus could with poetic music invent a girl
Who sat by oranges, wore a red dress.
Like Adam he could name, so he named
His imaginary creation, Eurydice.

So with his music, he had Eurydice die,
Then with his music, he went to Hades
To charm with music the Eumenides
And resurrect Eurydice to follow him.

But Eurydice knew the precariousness of her existence.
She, the musically created, knew she transcended her creator,
She also knew the ritual, the looking back over the shoulder,
The attempt to return that renders the attemper a non-existent.
After a long anxious pause, she tried to embrace
The destination, the distance, found her arms empty,
But her breasts pierced with arrows from crenellated towers,
So Eurydice
Spun around
To stare
At what
Had been behind.

About the Author:   Now after being forcefully evicted by what he calls "The Tampa Gestapo" (city inspectors) from his fifty year home in the Tampa crime district and slums, Duane now lives in luxurious retirement at Lake Morton Plaza by a lake populated with wild birds in Lakeland, Florida. His Tampa environment was pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and the homeless, but now is Snowy egrets, Wood Ibis and Wood Ducks.

Duane has a Doctor of Philosophy degree, specializing in poetry from Donne to Marvell. During his academic career at a less-than-mediocre university which he considers a waste of his life he taught varied courses in poetry from Homer to Michael Palmer.

The entire Spring 2004 issue of the magazine Bitter Oleander is devoted to a 92 page interview and sixty of his poems. The book Extraordinary Interpretations by Gary Monroe has a discussion of his paintings.