A Thesis Out of Durkheim Lyrics
The day is a ritual gesture that conceals
the impulse to kill hides
the desire to die oneself
The day is ritual, mechanical
affections mocking solidarity
and solidarity––its human promise––
yet concealed within those gestures
of the day he stood pressed against the railing,
drug-tired to kill the drive to die oneself
The golden age is ritual,
the golden age as catastrophe
in the city of commodities,
the city of arcades, city of crowds––
of crowds utopian and imperiled
briefly turned to commune but beaten back
to crowd, the language of the city
modern,
city of gas light of arc light
of incandescent light, city of the blue-
green aquarium light in the arcade,
the weird blue-green novelty of being
safely estranged and walking and buying
or being bought in the city of fashion,
the city, its sign of wish reflected
in dolls’ eyes, the city of wish as mere
price in a prostitute’s kiss, city
of surface, the city as social relations,
coursing along and through those distances,
the city immaterial, and wandering
its day is a ritual idyll that conceals––
the day is a ritual that conceals the death
inside the idyll inside the day’s surface
and gestures––the city of new soldiers,
the language of state-formation, city
of propaganda by the deed, the language
of its negation, city of anomie––
out through the city he walked
out through the city of images he walked (an image like
everyone else)
seeking a science equal to this collective
of ruleless images, its mastering
narrative–– a theory of anomie inside
voluntary death, a theory of moral
sickness inside suicide statistics.
“...do you remember Émile, how Pissarro’s picture of the two peasant women
talking, how the light, the surface of the thing seemed to bear the real
solidarity of their conversation, solidarity against, or through their labor, this
moment of brief reprieve against the toil and anomie of life, all that in a
painting.” After sipping his coffee the inventor of Sociology, smiled.
the desire to die oneself contains
the impulse to kill mechanical affections
detective, he might as well be hanging
on the family-tree––there he is hanging,
the image-he-is hanged from your family-tree,
his line cut, say it, detective,
he’s your brother, say it
to kill the impulse to kill conceals
the desire to die oneself
The poem is a ritual that conceals
guilt inside the surface
and gestures of solidarity,
its human promise,
its day
About
Jeffrey Pethybridge is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013). His work appears widely in journals such as Chicago Review, Volt, Poor Claudia, The Iowa Review, LIT, New American Writing and others. He is also the North American Editor for Likestarlings, a web-archive of collaborative poetry and poetics. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University and PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri, and teaches courses in poetry and small press publishing at Susquehanna University.
He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania with the poet Carolina Ebeid and their son Patrick; together they curate and host the Lord Weary’s Reading Series. He’s currently at work on a documentary project centered on the recently released torture-memos entitled “Found Poem Including History, an Essay on the Epic.” He grew up in Virginia.
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