Shooting ad-lib
the self-indulgent point of pain
didn’t know it was a farce
or that the Eskimo standing by
couldn’t recognize the party girl
few of them wanted to see.

My western was crazy,
like Johnny Guitar,
dirty hipster with a guitar on his back
and a penchant for cannabis,
dressed in cowboy brown
intensely invisible in a Godard dimension.

I want to make a movie
I want to make a movie
M-O-V-I-E
the massacre in one man’s
unsophisticated burning hell.
It’s very popular now;
the umbilical cord will be effective
because we will not fake it;
we shall not fake the human target
or the sky dragging the corpse
or the Chinese gun;
the moaning of sexual tension
between the two women,
putting the posse in black,
the murder weekend
is corrosive and irresistible skepticism
handsomely portrayed.

It is also something more…
It is the unpublishable mind incubator,
the smoke puppet,
the roughneck manipulation,
and the shot fired fear.

 

copyright,  © 1989, 2009 Chris Desjardins pka Chris D.

composed circa 1975-78; originally published in DOUBLE SNAKE BOURBON, reprinted in A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE.    

A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE is an epic, career-spanning anthology of Chris D.'s writings, published by New Texture. Buy it here.