Arguing with Something Plato Said

(for Phil Garrison and Peter Lamborn Wilson)

As ashes are the shadow of smoke,

panic is the shadow of light,

beef the shadow of grass,

love the shadow of attention,

psychology the shadow of plastic

the shadow of oil the shadow

of giant ferns the shadow of

bacteria the shadow of light’s grandmother,

rosy finch the shadow of loon,

jealousy & myth twin shadows of desire,

Europe shadow of a desert river,

idea the shadow of pain,

sleep the shadow of bread,

liquid the shadow of lust,

time the shadow of

et cetera,

logos is the shadow of what happens.

Take some broad-shouldered little fart, at las-

t, fresh from the 5 o’clock (morn) shadow of barbarism,

squatting over barley-paste, hot goat, dried fig

(meal the shadow —

since the shadows were removed

from rocky Grecian hills, trees cut away,

soil reduced to olive grounds —

down to shadow of surroundings —

of Homeric

heaps of meat that cast deadanimal-shaped shadows

by the tents on the sandy shores of Ilium)

squatting over his shapeless shadow in the shadow of the Parthenon —

itself

shadow form from wood, “in the light of”

stone. Well now, there’s been some

organized ruckus in his medium, rare town, which,

God knows, nobody there “thought” would

survive, a golden paradigm, for thousands of

Apollonian twirls. Who knows what they thought

of what they thought? It must’ve

been intensely local; that

the universe crept into

valley code was just

brain refreshment. Dirt was all

around. Some bright body shambled

the streets — in mud & heat — barely

shook his bald, Why is the sky

blues into registration, virgin

ears & experienced buttholes,

as the shadow of estrangement from

a bloody dream’s red tape, & got chemicaled,

but Mr. Broad Wit seized

evaporation from the street to isolate

spirit of

spearmint from what had always gone before.

Summer was a-comin’ in still (Lawdy!

sing coo-coo!), facts & symbols

be-danced & babblin’

beat of a million bovine feet

upon the tender luxury

sidewinding from the brain.

So he thought “Thought!” Why not?

Natural! in a sense. Never before

had such perfect innocence been explored

like new property.

Well, such a new idea as “idea”

looks pretty good till you can check out how it settles into the ground.

Blood’s biodegradable but logos

piled up like a plastic eyesore, fore-

shadowed a bloodless dry reign,

precipitation of pedestrain pedantry,

pedestrian mind for millenia, postulating

its pustulations of post- & pre-, professing

everything, subjugating us all in the tick-tech

burned-out success of a nob objectivity,

turning babble to a soapy

bubble up up & away until pop!

goes the wizard.

Aw c’mon, the alchemy that pilfers

from golden sundance volumes of German silver

sucks tongue of essence —

ah yes, essence, with its can-do incandescence,

like “Lovelight’s our leverage to spring some uptight average

from alla this quotidian sewage

& italicize it, boot it through the uprights

to an airy footnote.”

So anyway this guy imagined up God outa the play-dough

of his panicked exclusions

& then compounded the felony by trying to imitate the damn thing,

double-indemnity solipsism in the fool’s guise of cool & wise

utopian Republic! Razional! Sozialismus!

Computerized zoosphere! Hologram rain forest — a more direct

use of light.

But despite all right & crystal wings, thinking

that — “The-variability-of-the-world-has-no-more-reality-than-the-shadows-on-a-cave-wall”—

has no more reality than

Plato’s reflection in the waters

of a Theater-of-Dionysus Port-O-Let.

Well, he thought he was correting a mess

& left a mess of

shadows for our meat.

If unity really strung out from above,

not shot up from below, we’d have

no babies to throw out with

anybody’s rationalized bathwater.

Islands in the stream

of biosphere placidly gavotte

drinking play-tonic sprinkled geo-

metrically, until the teleology

becomes archaic — & eats it too.

The world pole-flips one more time, mechanically geo-

mantric, shakes the pants off of objective

dance to reveal gradual chance, just

numbers having a ball, as the rationale

of it all.

Back up a hemidemisecond! My better half

says — “In the winter the house is all shadow.”

But the long hot summer of essentialism

“was” a system of no resistance —

& all the psychological shit that makes a

toilet contemplative, inner-directed: a pure good-bye.

Yet it was hard (abstract thought),

difficult to invent, like anything you can’t

immediately step on, phrase or foot —

(& 4 is the shadow of 3 is the shadow of 2 is the shadow of 1

& old is the shadow of Jung

& red is the shadow of orange

& dots the shadow of dot

& hand is the shadow of and

however the shadow of breath

& season the shadow of winter

the step the shadow of the gesture

& soprano is the shadow of the star

& ring’s shadow is “orange”

& window shadow of the shadow.)

—after all, Empedocles

& Anaximander had

illuminated life as shadows of whatever, up from sea-slime,

dissolving to the harmony of a sphere.

Logos, in the light, is only haze,

a honey-head, that the shape

be kept as “beautiful.”

(& the shadow structure

is the real — it’s not being looked at

nor still distorted by leftover rays in the shadowee,

nor in such relation to light as shadowing implies:

once you’ve taken in the light,

you’re artificially simple for good — bedazzled.

Chiaroscuro conjures up dichotomy — Step 1,

then, as it loses all idea to total presence,

becomes invisible enough.

& we’re home.

Lightning strikes — OK.

Half-known moves around the kitchen.

The cereal box is food for thought.

Is it easier to be right when you’re already wrong?

Hmm, cool today; better pull on my dark-blue paradigm.

The quality of nothing is not strained,

but saying so’s tense like a cartoon zebra.

“The variability of the world”

— incidental winks of it start to party into view —

absolutely hot & cool, at the moment,

is, & likely to remain so.)

Eat a fig. Drink some coffee. Went driving

today ’73 bug mid-Sunday plus live-in sweetie

over littered subtle prairie out to Erie where we

coffee smoke four baconstrips & country fries breathed in the

work like hell old dirt streets & east to Firestone Screwball pool coke

& ice Route 52 two dozen silver queen Indian corn

Valmont Road yellow plum tomatoes cloudy light above

Kiowa Peak stoplight bickyard pond by Public Service.

Copyright Credit: Jack Collom, “Arguing with Something Plato Said” from Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000, published by Tuumba Press. Copyright © 2001 by Jack Collom. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000 (Tuumba Press, 2001)