Pavement for a Dead Princess

In sorry dress stages they rehearse once again the third act
of Aphrodite. studio castings. long shadows down streets lined
with visible eating disorders filling empty beggar cups. ladles of procreative
gruel slosh over the sides to pass down the lines of succession
served bullion cubed

from both ends, robes of silk and sorrow, bloomless guns,
triggerless roses off-the-rack, cherubs dine on mothballs
of unsettled settlings in the closets of celebrity - individuated
reminiscences of fathers reenacted, mother's stooping, weeping,
mothering, bearing light-meters hovering above intestinal
contents of human auto shrapnel rearranged to good effect,

for contrast, insertions into frac^tures of story-board assignments
realized in associative play over the appetites of salacious
and wishful units of desire entertaining themselves with
transmissions of fabricated oprahlence. The chilD now father
of a ghost in skin of bag bones

What drives this hunger -- tent cities of soup bowls glass flies -
its supply-side celebrification? A cramp? A purchase order?
A few hundreds of milLlions worth of charlie horses flinging
themselves into the wire racks at check-out stands for tiger balm?
High-stakes communion, land-mine wafers with charitable deductions
adopting posters of children in Brazil, Bosnia, Calcoota, Des Moines,
shut-ins ordering take-out plastic surgery for digitized faces
on a stage of vast unpopulated social architectures?

bag bowls of soup bones rattling in stooped knit dresses

"Psychologically healthy people have no need to indulge
fantasies of absolute power; nor do they need to come to terms
with the reality by inflicting self-mutilation and prematurely
courting death. But the critical weakness of an over-regimented
institutional structure -- and almost by definition 'civilization' was over-
regimented from the beginning -- is that it does not tend to produce
psychologically healthy people." - Mumford, 1966.

Marilyn 1926-1962.       Diana 1961-1997. over & over

a planet of charnel houses -- the law on the bullion, the light in the tunnel
looking for tennants. Posthumous vacuum dances responding
to some need for settlement by inhabitants fit for the occupation
of unbodied domains ordering up greater than life replicas
of plastic saints with which to populate the crèches of state ,
create demography, till landscapes planted in rows of institutions.
Were not corporations-as-persons sufficient?

Celebrity fits the bill, though. Ghost templates for the expanded
image bag bones of actors spouting philosophy, players defining,
tragedy, athletes rolling out new models of ethics, pumped & primed
until the new image rises to the surface of the umbra, becomes
the ordinary citizen construct operating the machinerys of cost-benefit
analysis, due process by terrorism by due process, by supply&demand
warfare fed from longings from below - new titans on the surface
of the world

order feeding on street-lined appetites, folded into vapors
of instant communication, now talk to one another in stooped
languages arising only from the architecture itself, from its walls
from spigots upstream pouring children into street bowls lying in
terms of state, aware only of the passing of human seed
as organ constituents buying magazines while massive heart-failures
stage events speak SpectacLE receive purchase orders for photo-op story-book
models of grace and gratification to occupy the new structures
of condo eurodollars west-end east-end regiments over casting calls knocking
bag bones into soup bowls/ the knit on the sorry

"Harrods...Haute couture?"

"Not this time, ready-to-wear will do fine."

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