rodney koeneke

Humanism Is Cheese

hello, my name is sam
although I do not have an avenue
you simply cannot see my humanism
as part of the recurring slippage in the cheese sensors
without telling me how to move through tomorrow
where the secular is an arena
for elitists to crush the vulgar—
yes I’m a fat pig because I eat chili cheese fries every day.

You cannot see the sutures
no matter how passionately and sincerely
you read their educational materials
because for them, in their valley of consensus, it’s posthumanist myth
while community is an honor
or you participate in Ethical Humanist Cheese party day.

Recent studies emphasize that colonisation created a gap
inside the kind of blankness that’s inside us
and that violence is its alchemy for labeling
that works by blurring the organic consensus structures
all humanism implies: it creates serene results
with a perceptible level of violence just beneath ...
Cheese rarely comes to you and if it does, it is alive.

Alloyed body space creates a unit that is like Kierkegaard,
lesions for a post-Dutch world. Negotiation is a dangerous place
but each of us does it frequently every day.
Junkspace does not pretend to create perfectionism,
only interest in penetrating the commissaries
assuming you are more humanist than postmodernist
firmly convinced that the body
is a giant Midwest assembled around a stream of hunger

And I notice my anxiety levels rise
when somebody else tries to say this
but dairy ennobles a person, helps them grow
warm, humanist, inclusivist, arbitrary
because I deplore aporia
the official version of which looks like Swiss cheese.

 

A Birthday Poem for Nada Gordon

Nada in what gardens of the imagination
do you water the meaty blossoms of excess?
By means of what adrenal throbbing
are you able distribute your followers across a subcontinent
stopping them at waterways to irrigate their dreams?

Unlike oldies stations too parsimonious with the Beatles
afraid that no one will want to hear anything else,
you perform the benevolent rites of the Parsee
generously spiking our brownies with hashish.

Pack animals drop from exhaustion daily
in the snowy Himalayas of the everyday;
businessmen enjoy their vinaigrette
at busy restaurants where the unconscious scrunches uneasily in booster chairs.
Above them, cool in the mind’s high court you sit
invigilating specialness
the non-fun want eclipsed.

Along whose ganglia will you continue to sparkle,
proto-Australoid and beautiful?
What future esplanades will you grace with your saunter,
smooth as Dev Anand in “C.I.D.?”
Only the mad see everything as language,

Only the palms supply rattan
for the dizziness created by an indolent ceiling fan
pushing the air through woozy ululations
in a room whose only point is holding you.