by Michael T. Smith.
I cited Lacan to make a poem: novelty,
in which everything is a slave,
who further lacks everything but desire.
To meet the unconscious yet living WORD
like a myth that turned out
to be
Real —
Another Lacanian term
(as told by the “five” real senses,
unlike the object petit a in our back pocket),
which means something like the truth,
(suggested typo: “some things lie”)
by a definition that you will never know,
that which you will never know
because it is the topology of what cannot be known.
Floating, psychoanalysis hovers over our beds
like a dead relative,
a specter
saying ‘Happy Birthday son;’
if you want to live a life of pure jouissance,
be a machine —
for to Hegel every master is a former slave,
including Hegel.
To us we can have masters but never be masters.
Our hands and feet shackled in a Borromean knot
For pleasure.
To the master the self is a haughty task,
a Mobius strip of
ego.