Light Lies the Crown

I look at your photo and wonder how many dark ages could fit in the enchantment-space between your lipstick and your fishnets. I wonder what it would be like to possess a magic body, with its capability to legitimize any attitude, any artifact or trinket.

You are a ship, afloat on a sea of equivalencies, up whose sides a million and one inherited gestures clamber to escape the depths of obsolescence. The tattoo. The rings. The lolita skirt.

A hammer, hung from chicken wire, would become an article of cultural gravity if bracketed in your cleavage. A sneer of your beautiful mouth would justify a Hitler moustache drawn above it. Today, Led Zeppelin mariachi Baudelaire electro-hookerism. Tomorrow, S&M post-punk Eskimo archaeology.

You are our laureate - we, a generation without art. A poetry of ornaments. You are a ransom note, written with fragments of ancestral wreckage. Give us back our ability to be more than beautiful. Give us back to the ocean.