Let me see how noisy this thing is.
You hear me OK as I speak now?
OK.
I'll start off with a poem against people
who think that art is immortal.
"Against the Text 'Art Is Immortal.'" "All authors
temporal, all art gets lost.
Go to Egypt, go look at the Sphinx, it's falling apart.
He sits on water in the desert and the water table shifts.
He has lost his toes in the sand,
blast of the Saharan winds of a mere 2,000 years.
The Mamelukes shot up his face because they were iconoclasts,
because they were musketeers.
The British stole his beard because they
were imperialist thieves.
It's in the cellar of the British Museum
where the Athenians lost their marbles.
And that city of ideas that Socrates once had in mind
has faded too like the Parthenon from car exhaust
and from the filthiness of the Turks who used it as a dump.
If that city ever was for real in public works and not just
words he said, no things but in ideas, no ideas
but in things, I say as William Carlos Williams said,
things as the Sphinx is our thing.
A beast of a man made God stoned into art
to guard the dead from nothing, nothing and vanishing toes
first in the desert.
Sand blasted off into nothing.
For a few thousand years of air, sand, take your pick.
So go to Egypt.
Go look at the Sphinx while it lasts.
Art is not immortal, art is not mortal.
Art is ideas in things.
All art is temporal.
All art is lost.
The imperial desert is moving in with water, sand, and wind
to where the godly native beasts the man apart back
to the nothing that sculpted him.
I remember the Mamalukes, remember the Brits,
they were the iconoclasts of their own times.
Primitive musketeers, primitive chisels.
This time we can really blast the beast of man to bits."