PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT
To be an artist in any sense or medium
is to take what science has to offer,
to put in your pipe,
and smoke it.
Take the ashes out of the pipe
and smear it onto something. That’s art.
Science is a system of parameters and frames,
of scaffolds and blueprints,
that seeks to define the way our existence is organized.
Science informs us that our existence is disorganized
(At least by the standards set
by The Scientific Community).
I hate the way in which
science and art are pitted against each other
Like two ends of a worm that wriggle
away from each other, neither of them
cognizant of the fact that
They are the same worm.
I hate the way in which
science and art are conjoined in our understanding
Because goddammit, whoever thought of
a worm divided into two hemispheres
by two brains which are moreover divided
Into two hemispheres.
Fortunately, biological research has shown that
“Segmented Worms (Phylum Annelida) have two
cerebral ganglia which are considered
primitive brains”. So there are no hemispheres
by which to split this creature in two,
But it allows for a damn good poetic metaphor.
To be an artist in any sense or medium
is to take what science has to offer,
to put it in your pipe,
and smoke it.
Scrape the gunk out of your lungs
and smear it onto something. That’s art.
Science includes anatomy, which is a method
of understanding the physical ingredients and stuff
that make up our bodies. I read
the instructions for gestation, how our nerves
and veins are cradled around our bones
Propelled by rivulets of muscle.
I was a boy, and as a boy, I stamped
my boy feet into the earth, assuming
that as I did so I would be propelled forward.
But my legs were tools, and I had to implement them
properly, which meant bending and breaking
My knees until I eventually threw in the towel.
Now I have escaped the trap of boyhood and stepped into
a terrain in which anatomy serves little purpose.
Well, that’s a lie. Its purpose is to disrupt
this newly-stretched skin-suit-condom called
non-binary-ness, although it also seeks to understand
What I am before soaking me in a formaldehyde jar.
It was on a dark dance floor in Petersburg
where I learned that even a stretched-out
skin-suit-condom non-binary dragon-rider can learn
to bend one’s legs in order to propel
to and fro, to reach a destination that can’t be found
On any metro map—not even Yandex.
To be an artist in any sense or medium
Is to take what science has to offer,
to put it in your pipe,
and smoke it.
Take the buzzing in your head
and transmogrify it into something I can perceive. That’s art.
A dear poet told me yesterday
that he has a tornado in his throat.
He helped me realize that all my life
I had been using my lungs to snatch
notes out of the air to reverberate
In the ears of my audience as song.
So too do soundwaves reverberate
through graphs and waveforms, in full view
of self-eating self-replicating donuts
and a liar who pulls himself up out of a swamp
by his ponytail. Fuck bootstraps, we now know
That everyone deserves a chance to live.
I think of the feelings I get
when collections of chemicals inside a leaf
are burned and inhaled into my lungs
and I travel through my past times,
seeing who I used to be as well as
Who I used to be to other people.
I can carry that feeling through Limbo,
a voyeur into the lives and meals
of the petty bourgeois white people
just as a pink goose is currently acting
as a voyeur of my ‘process’, which is
Throwing my pipe against the wall to see what sticks.
To be an artist in any sense or medium
is to take what science has to offer,
to put in your pipe,
and smoke it.
Take the ashes out of the pipe
and add more science. That’s art.
