Los Angeles - Deep Muck Cultural Concerns

Tearing scabs off the cultural landscape
reveals bloody layers of previously picked
and poked layers of man-made icons,
celebrity bandages, and billboard gauze
barely covering the oozing yellow infection
of our self-inflicted wounds.

Forever recycling endless pretty impostors
not truly believing the lines written for them,
A hint of understanding lurks too deeply behind the surface
of dissassociated denial
to take anything at face value.
The face has been cosmetically altered
anyway,
sabatoging the wisdom of age from celebrating
anything remotely substantial.

Irony splashs shiny glossy over
neo-reality, post-realism, nilism and hip-hop.
A new paint job hurriedly washes the slick
oily walls of current ideas,
leaving barely a moment of fresh, if not quiet,
rectangles of silence, before a new multiplicity of
one sheets, TV sweeps, .coms, or yet unpublished
graffitti take fleeting residence.

Poets move words around each other
searching for new turns and embraces
to end
the pain of separation.
Few can describe the eternity of their recurrent
anguish.

Artists rehash history, reinvent conceptual redundancy
then beat themselves to death for not communicating
their deepest struggle for transformation and ascension .


How many can break thru barriers of their own forgotten making
into realms of the invisible, unspeakable fullness?
Some actions take the courage of outrage
Some, the strength of a whisper
Whatever the form, faith is the master.

Some true mad souls keep reaching
Thru the quicksands of culture.
Not clinging to the seeking,
they struggle.
Not clinging to the struggle,
they seek.

- Ellen Giamportone
1999