The conventional narrative structure could not hold, at least in my poetics, and collapsed on itself into another bit of philosophical experimental writing. The woman with the beard returns, and in a somewhat masturbatory burst of thought experimentation, she explores conspiracy-theory political philosophy while reclining in the toad’s garden.

Please leave your comments below. A few posts back I mentioned my thoughts about gathering this spring-summer writing into a book. For those who didn’t already respond, what do you think? Would you buy the book? Print or e-Book? Or is the blog sufficient publication for these little forays?

Political Philosophy

The woman with the beard didn’t care much one way or the other about her hair, even though she preferred smooth-faced lovers. The day bent like a knee around the heat of the sun. She sipped Coca-Cola slowly, just to please her friends.

Without warning the filter of memory collapsed around her, a kaleidoscope of indecency exciting her erotic fantasies. Her lovers came back to her, their best orgasms, their lingering foreplay, each of their singular fires burning bright, like a comet in the night.

So she tossed the football around in her mind, catching it this way and that way until she dropped her hands to her sides.

At moments like this, the toad invited her to his garden. Mathematically imaginary numbers slipped into the square root of negativity while reeling fishing filaments through wrinkles of time-space reality. With the toad, it all came down to gravitational fields distorted by speeding photons collapsing time into.

No, she thought, stretched out in the lounge chair amid the sunflowers, tadpole pool, and morning glories. Another mind experiment only leads to intellectual emptiness, a European philosophy of theoretical nothingness derived from envy of Buddhism. Empirical error aside, the escape from metaphysics into socio-linguistic parameters scratched into the wall of a prison cell burned the flesh of the pan-hopping flea.

In the end, it came down to a group of industrialists and financiers attempting to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and install fascism in the U.S., just before the Second World War. The scions of the conspirators followed the thread more patiently, the filament of time allowing three generations to do their work.

By the time the third generation arrived, the stars reflected across the waves of space-time, and the right-angled mirrors found smoke to create the necessary illusions. Here, she thinks, we find the divergence of politics from history as it settles around the dust of religion.

The politician she once shared a bed with died in a calculated plane crash for his sin of believing in the process. She still sometimes drops a tear or two for him.

She stopped worrying about all of this when she realized that the enemy shot real bullets through proxy warriors’ guns.

She didn’t used to believe in conspiracy theories, then took them on as a cause, but now considers how to change the consciousness of the train wreck when the locomotives all have dead men driving them and the radio controls remain set on kill.

Once, on her farm, she constructed a sculpture from junked appliances, rusted tractor parts, car body parts left on a junk pile.

Benjamin’s Angel of History shoved car-door wings against a train wreck of discards. A bit of hose and a solar-powered fountain pump provided tears to drip down its face, over a bent fuel tank that resembled a gas mask.

When the politician came into her life, he insisted she had to take it down.

The electorate would rebel, he said.

Let them make war, she answered. We’ll make more than enough love to win.

His plane crashed three weeks later, and she pulled the sculpture down a few days later.

The train had overtaken her angel’s wings and wrecked any last illusion she had of historical progress.