You know I've been indulging in plenty of television lately
Bootleg videotapes of Six Feet Under
DaVinci's Inquest every Sunday
American movies like Prophecy and Mimic
Dubbed into French on TVA or TQS
The Last Metro with English subtitles on CBC
Sade without English subtitles on TeleQuebec.
Sex and the City is the perfect program for the New Roman Empire
Set in New York City there was no mention of 9-11
But the twin towers quietly vanished from the opening credits
Cleanly edited out
The only problems in that sexy city are
What to wear
Who to lay
And how to get paid
Please don't let me drift away
Lately I've been reading the letters of Ernest Hemingway
I get to hear all about his wives and his kids
And some of the terrible accidents he had,
The one in the car where his arm was so badly broken
The one where he broke the steering column with his chest
He liked to get away from it all by shooting, fishing and whoring
Me and Hemingway surfing the porn sites
Me and Hemingway playing this video game
The aim of the game is to kill anything that moves
Deer, elk, moose, brown bear, black bear, grizzly bear, polar bear, bighorn sheep, musk ox, killer whale, dolphin, shark, partridge, grouse, turkey, eagle, buzzard, rabbit, rat, hog, wolf, tiger, lion, emu, ibyx, elephant, and finally 122 human beings in a special hunting ground called World War Two.
It goes
Hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt
Tank tank kill kill tank tank kill kill
Hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt
Tank kill kill tank kill kill
Hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt hunt
Supertank kill kill kill kill supertank kill kill kill kill
Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill
Oh no I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead I'm dead
Me and Hemingway, killing time
Please don't let me drift away
I walk into the kitchen, which actually exists.
My bananas are green.
I bought them almost a week ago, when will they turn yellow?
How do people go on?
Sade, directing a tableau vivant with his fellow inmates
And digging mass graves.
They called it The Terror.
Times change.
Drinking just gives me a headache.
If I smoke pot will I be funnier?
Will this world be funnier?
I find it impossible to imagine anything beyond this perpetual escape
Into drugs, or drink, or sex or cigarettes or whatever works
The beautiful timelessness of Disney World,
The white sand resorts safe behind strands of electrified wire
Games of chance, games of conquest
Escaping all the time
Into our jobs, our hobbies, our families, our dreams
People hiding for years in goddamn basements in Nazi-occupied France
How did they stand it without video games, porn sites, and television?
We go to the theatre and sit next to Nazis,
We watch movies, we make love
Making little tableau vivants while The Terror looms behind us.
The godlike energy of murder
We rise on a tower of blood
Primitive, male
We rise on a column of fire
Gods of thunder
We achieve
Escape velocity
We escape
The earth
Please don't let me drift away
Please don't let me
Burn
Besides being broadcast on CBC's Arts Talk radio show, the recording has been issued by myself a couple of times (on a cassette and a CDR) and reprinted in the chapbook / CDR I Am Burdened With A Past
Vincent Tinguely is a Montreal writer and poet. He is the co-author of Impure — Reinventing the word, a book about the Montreal spoken word scene. He frequently writes about spoken word and literary events for the free weekly Montreal Mirror.
