THE DANSE OF EMMA GOLDMAN AT THE DISCO: CONVERTED FROM AN
ABANDONED DIME STORE

from "Ghost Dance 55", 1992

Duane Locke


privileged was the resonance, 
the reverberations,
the eternal return,
not internal and conceptual sense.
The ruptures the displacements.

The windows were trompe l'oeils,
photographic replicas, relics,
of what was across the street,
the side of another abandoned
dime store:
Vermeer yellow bricks, with nicks
due to bullets.

The window glass, special, invented
by an exhibitionist,
one side, opaque with the trompe
l'oeils of what was across the street;
the outside
transparent
     for passer-bys and peeping toms
to look in and watch the end of the narrative,
the narcotic.

Out in the vestibule Clement of
Alexandria
commented to a girl in a coma
that Euripides regarded only the truth,
and not the audience.
The girl in a coma mumbled,
"Meaning is deferred until countersigned."

The transformative movements continued,
the conversion of the self from private
to public property.

Cinderella's pelvic penthouse pulsations
her pentadactylic castaneting, her
castaway pentimento:
child abuse -- paternal, maternal,
fraternal, freelance --
received multiple and conflictual
interpretations.

Cinderella changed her name to Emma Goldman
and repeated, "If I can't dance I don't want
to be a part of your revolution."
SATURDAY NIGHT, SUNDAY MORNING
A SIMULATION OF A STIMULATION

from "Ghost Dance 55", 1992


   A nineteenth-century costume occasion,
a revival
of the ossified -- oscillations, osculations
copulations
to be waltzes,
         three quarter atemporal time.

The waltz freed from the threat of teleology
and Boston tea parties. Each dance (danse)
has no past,
each dance hagiographic and celebratory,
each step a step outside the consumer society system,
                    upright
epileptic trances,

Cinderella in her Glas slippers came to the
Disco
looking for an alternative lust
to lust for commodies,
to anesthetize, aestheticize
her desires
to make purchases.

Schoenberg's transcriptions of Strauss,
orchestrated for amplified guitar by
Klimt,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ludwig II,
who hid behind a potted palm and smoked
pot
with his horse. And a waltz
                       by Franz Lehar:
"The Gold Standard and Silver Scandal."

Gliding, glissando, over the glazed, glaucous
floor,
in her Glass slippers, Cinderella commented:
"The Gold Standard and Silver Scandal"
has gone unrecognized and misunderstood until
now, has been violement or marginalized.  But now
that lt has been misheard
and composer's intentions discarded
lt has a new and significant, temporary meaning."

Anne Bradstreet remarked to Sappho:
"We have, you and you, Flesh and Spirit, awakened
the silent past and made it speak no-logocentric,
speaking an atemporal three quarter time gibberish,
the only language with a referent."

Earth hath more silver scandals, pearls to purchase
and gold standards
than eyes can see, or hands can hold."

Tristan Tzara, wearing a reflector monocle,
waltzed alone,
surrounded by a circle, all clapping
in atemporal three quarter time, yelling,
cheer leading him to score a Don Juan touchdown,
don't punt, or punk, but go for it on the fourth,
the fourth down, the fourth of July, go for it,
although the ball, the masked ball, is downed
forty four feet from the Gold Standard line.

Tzara: "the stock share turns the mist of gnomes
under the stunted day of mimes without an origin."

Clement of Alexandria interrupted the soliloquy
of Tzara,
"But there are some  who  after the manner,
the mannerism of   Wurms, the last stage of
extreme cold,
the stage we play and perform upon, Worms
and its council,   wallow in marshes and mud  and
feed on   profitless and senseless   non Gold
Standard
delights and these rotating, leaping colored lights.

Clement and Cinderella (Emma Goldman) waltzed,
atemporally, to the decentered ring for
a language game of mud wrestling.