Green tea with cardamon. Ibn Khaldun
declaims the dialectic of the steppe:
“6000 years cuneiform & shit
have buried the barbarians too soon
“The tinker wagon in the knacker’s yard
a pile of fecal bile & psychic sludge
the tourist & the terrorist as twins –
boredom-nomadism hits us hard
“Why choose this strip-mall over that?
Crisscrossed with highways, mapped from outer space
a text-based life, the closure of the West
the RV world, the backwards baseball hat
“Consumed but never lived – no smell, no taste
no seasons, weather, grazing, music, milk
our rootless cosmopolitan is stumped
by fastfood cities sinking into waste
“A temporary nomad zone explored
but only in the land of hungry ghosts –
homeless cranks dead hobos crusty punks
can’t constitute a true Barbarian Horde
“The plan of Ghengis Khan: burn pillage raze
the city to a pyramid of skulls
till earth as featureless as living sea
at last withdraws its parasitic gaze
“The animals return in 2012
a prairie will restore itself in time
a Scythian mummy turns up in the ruins
& shakes Von Humbolt from his dusty shelves
“Connecticut assumes a desolate air
your wild boys on the move – the wire clipped
the herds roam free – is this the end
the urban Armageddon? Will we care?”
By Peter Lamborn Wilson
