Poetry:
    A Jaywalker Just Yelled
    The Recount of a Dream

Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi
Ph.D candidate
University of British Columbia.
E-mail: smfatemi@hotmail.com

Way down south in the Isle of Solipsism,
Feminism is honking the horn.
Postmodernism has broad-sided the wheels of Certainty in the crossroad of Reality.
The officers of Globalization are patrolling around to modify
Bumper-to-bumper wagons of localization. They call it a fender bender.
Structuralism has jammed the brakes.
The omnibus of Dis-combobulation is burning rubber
Eating everyone's dust.
New Criticism has just conked out.
The cyclists of Deconstruction are putting the pedal to the metal,
Sticking out their tongues, giving the bird to Feminism.
New Colonialism, tailed by Colonialism is souping up its engine.
It has already had a pile-up.
Ethnography is turning on its blinkers in the fast lane of ambiguity,
Getting a booster from Phenomenology.
Empiricism has side-swiped Structuralism but is going to gas up soon.
Besides, it got a flat tire when it blew the doors off Romanticism.
Yeah, it's a traffic jam.
Traffic lights are still off.
"Hey, watch your steps!", a jaywalker just yelled.
He is gives a boo to all the traffic signs.
Oh, he is shouting again: "Signs should be changed!
Let's walk in the open air, breathe in liveliness!
Signs should be changed!"

 

The Recount of a Dream

The other night I had a dream that may not be a dream
According to the Analysis of a dream.
It was a lucid yet inconspicuous dream where aberration,
Absurdity and sensibility marshaled their lunacy and delicacy.
I dreamed of Jacques Lacan galloping the horse of signifiers,
Lashing and thrashing the signified.
He was incessantly sliding and slithering, wearing the inflammatory shoes,
Trampling upon the flow of luminosity and serenity,
Satirizing and upbraiding Freud with a bar of repression.
I saw Jacques Lacan scuffle with Paul Ricoeur.
Ricoeur severely slapped him back and let him fall
While Lacan was hastily chasing the omnibus of signifiers in and out
Insisting on satyriasis.
Signifiers were unanimously crying
Vociferously berating and flagellating Strauss and Saussure
For extraditing them into the hands of Lacan,
Exasperating and exacerbating the separation anxiety between
Signifiers and signified.
Schopenhauer and Berkeley were tickling each other,
Giggling and making a mockery of Russell, who was stuck in the mud up to his head Counting the particles of sense data
To corroborate the denial of anything else.
Jakobson was whistling, toying with metonymy and metaphor
While Freud was shrieking, nailing his head against his topographical Model of mind.
Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, De Man, and Jameson were groping and grappling
Either above or below the belt to solidify their own saddles.
The mob, the crowd, the people, the public, the lay were looking with insouciance,
Avoiding the purchase of nomenclature.

The dream went on and on.

And I saw a boy going to the post office of education to mail his letter of Loneliness When he was crushed by the parcel of skepticism and doubt.
And I saw a girl singing a song in the fog stricken imagination.
She was singing a song dating back to the time of cave dwellers.

This was just a dream or a dream of a dream,
Perhaps not a dream.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

Page Viewed:   / Created: 27 November 2002 / Updated: 3 December 2002