Dion Farquhar


Borderline

"I edited the Maharishi's books.
He was that close to me,"
gesturing with her arm cupped,
held out two feet in front of her.
 
"He was perfect.
His moons were perfectly aligned.
We were totally in sync.
It was incredible.
When I left the Ashram
I was pure light
and this guy saw it
and was attracted to me for it.
 
"He wanted to be together.
I said, 'We can't be together
if we're not married.'
He said, 'So let's get married.'
And we did.
But then we had to live together
and that was pure disaster.
It lasted seven months."

Overdetermined: 1968

They're going to make me into nothing. To make me
a puddle so I can be just what they want. Then I'll no
longer be. That was what their society was to me: The
fifties and the sixties. Hypocrisy.
--Kathy Acker, Requiem

           I past
                              threw my present
                                                           so fast
 
   margins    mistaken
 
                                                  for   prairies
 
      the future       positioned
 
           by twenty
 
                a double-edged            heritage          of negation
 
                                    (though still tied to time and place)
 
           banks only open 9-3
 
      & computers         where they existed      took up a whole room
 
before
 
      blast faxes               catalog shopping             phone sex
 
      not to mention       self-replicating molecular systems
 
                                                               I was
 
                                  devouring movable feasts
 
   Great Books           panegyrics to pricks               but what good writers
    
                            (and who knew?)
 
                               getting a sense       of the centuries
 
   Norman 0. Brown           the best we had
 
                                      genealogy    of morals   tie-dyed
 
       studying Greek     reading     Sartre  Heidegger
 
                                              Rimbaud    Joyce    Dostoevsky
 
 
                           Kafka    Plath     Leary
 
                                         stereo screaming half the night:
 
       despite      always having to get up  to change the record
 
                                     & WBAI blabbing   live    non-stop
 
      from       Woodstock    Prague       Chicago       Paris on fire
 
              & I at home in New York       my City     my cemetery
 
in a time              anything was possible           (so we thought)
 
      but really
 
                   over    determination                
                                                                 still reigned

 
 

Dion Farquhar is a poet and prose fiction writer obsessed by her formative experience of the Sixties, repudiating nothing. Her work has appeared in The Argotist, AUGHT, Rogue Scholars, Xcp: Streetnotes, boundary 2, Sulfur, Hawaii Review, Lip Service, Exquisite Corpse, City Works, Cream City Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and lots of other places.
 
 
 


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