Theorists and Other Assassins

James Bond at 80 - A Theoretical Poem - On a Moonless Steppe

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James Bond at 80

After that cock-up in Zanzibar
His bones never knit right.
The script was climbing to its climax:
Villainy thwarted, the standard raised,
In comforting vindication of the norm,
seasoned with a zest of sex 
And tasty cruelty. 
He recalls the scene:

General Barbarité in beret and fatigues
Lays splayed across the cool marble
Of his secret mountain lair;
Spitting the blood of defeat, 
The general flashes a red, defiant grin,
As his rebellion sputters, fizzles and expires
On the convenient bank of monitors
Above his supine sprawl.
The agent has dispatched many
Such clever and impudent thugs,
Restoring order with a quip
Drier than a martini in Tangiers.
He tugs at his crisp bow tie
And awaits the scoundrel’s soliloquy,
Words of unconsummated hate,
Of vengeance, oppression, justice,
And other tiresome twaddle
Of the beaten.
The plot requires the desperate launch
Of one last mad gambit
That will be defused with seconds on the clock.
The Commander knows the required rituals
Of his nation’s irresistible victory
But success has made him complacent
Smug, expectant and vulnerable.
Barbarité keeps his monologue short:
“Today the field is yours;
Tomorrow it will be ours.
Freedom can be diverted
But eventually must run its course.”
Then the wretch hardkicks the agent
And something inside cracks.

Later, while bedding Barbarité’s rescued captive
—The willingly subdued Adora Kiss—
He feels a surprise twinge in his hips,
An irritant at first
That he couldn’t help fingering
Like a loose thread on the Union Jack
That threatens to unravel the whole.
The stitch sharper grows with every
New briefing that makes him leg
From Hong Kong to Mumbai, Cairo to Buenos Aires.
As he jets across the antipodes,
From back alleys to baccarat tables,
Pain spreads across his physique,
Little insurrections in the flesh
Doused at night by vermouth and gin.
He is accustomed to being captain
Over a soldier’s body
That carries out instructions
With style, kink, a little snarl,
And unblinking obedience.
The eyes of the predator look outward,
The paths inward bricked up long ago.
Hamlet broods and grimly equivocates
But not him. He is not 
On speaking terms with his feelings
And ignores urgent bulletins from his nerves.
After 40 years of service to the crown
Each fibre off his torso is on fire.
He is a shuffling voodoo doll
Of pins, screws, scars and history.
Now James Bond steers a walker
Across Albion Retirement Gardens
Under a portrait of lilies and country churches,
Towards the fading light in the west.

Any assassin could catch him easily dead
In the crosshairs of a slow-slithering scope
But no sniper will waste a bullet
On the grey shadow of this once-great spy,
On this hobbled scarecrow
Stuffed with yesterday’s secrets.
A square and sturdy filipino nurse 
Garbed in loafers, hairnet and scrubs
Hands him an opaque plastic cup:
A rattle of daily meds 
He distractedly shakes
In a hand as weak
As an infant’s. Incorrigible,
James wheezes and flirts,
Unholstering once again 
The seduction line that opened
A thousand pair off legs.
The nurse kindly reminds him 
To watch his blood pressure,
Disposing of his proposition
Like a cat’s gift of a dead mouse, 
Or a cold morning bedpan.
He once had royal license 
To silence any enemy anywhere
Without fretting about pesky laws,
Or nearby daycares. His bullets
Rendered guilty whomever they touched,
A closed circle of justice.
Now his immunity depends not upon
The Queen’s sceptre but the staff,
Who clean his catheter
And swab gummy eyes.
His strength has fled, 
But his mouth won’t ask for help.
Being useless is worse than hell.
Of all the women he undressed,
He has no wife, no twilight companion
To make bearable the long grey.
Even his enemies have left him.
The Red Scourge was the first to go,
From enemy to ally (then back to foe)
The Russian bear dropped its pants low
And retreated into a bottle.
Many auditioned to fill the vacant role
—Terrorists and technocrats, 
Megalomaniacs and masterminds,
Oilmen and Oligarchs —
None had the right menace
To fill the villain’s void,
Leaving him to fight spectres.
Perhaps all his enemies
Have been mere phantasms,
Flickers in black and white.
What did all of his exploits accomplish?
He scuttled a few elections,
Buttressed a wall or two
That kept the Sultans safe
From the mad rabbling mobs,
Scuttled a Warrior made of Rainbows,
Showcased Armani shoes
And watches that garrote,
Poisoned a Ghandi or Mandela,
(Their names a strange blur)
Chased hoods across dirty favelas,
All so M and empire could
Endure a few years more
Before shattering into shards
In the glittering chaos 
of independence.
Freedom must run its course
Even if it makes 
A colourful mess of maps.

No matter that he outdanced death
In ways unreal and novel.
The Rolex on his wrist
Was always measuring
The final countdown:
Not of bioweapon or H-Bomb
But the burn time
Left in his cellular reactors,
Embering, faltering, fading into snuff.
He now confronts his final big bad:
The mysterious and chill Dr. Entropy,
Unraveller of all things.

What thoughts skitter through his mind
As the old man stands naked on eternity's shore
Before the great leveller?
Does he at last regret
Being the Lion's most loyal pet?
Did he refuse to yield?
Did a cosmic realization break across his brow
Before 007 reaches zero?

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A Theoretical Poem

A moment lingers between 9:06 and ‘7
When new-light makes my neighbour’s garden
Glimmer like a privy glimpse of heaven;
Dew-bejewelled lilies I like to watch
Raise droopy necks from sun-touched sleep,
Stretch, shake, stand and join the debauch
Of naked colour unfurled: the blush of rose,
Gold on purple, red around blue, all fucking
Beautiful, perfumed, entwined and in throes.

Then I recall words of Marx: View beauty askew!
Beauty’s a swindle that lets the rich screw
The poor, grunting in airless futility,
Packing playthings for princes of no utility.
From the shed I grab my sickle and hoe,
Decapitate the lilies and plant potato.
My neighbour fumes at his overturned beds;
Bleeding Hearts must die, if we’re to have bread.

At 10:09, my beloved climbs the narrow stair,
Night shirt spilling over flannel PJs,
Swaying hips hidden by long unkempt hair.
Like a worshipper in a lonely cathedral
I watch her moon ascend slow and skyward,
Shuffle of slippers holding me in thrall.
No stained-glass windows set high above
Ever transfixed the faithful in silent awe
As does my house goddess whom I love.

Then I recall the words of Woolf: Love is a trap
That shackles women with domestic crap.
Motherhood is a pink ribbon on a pink cage
A position praised, but unworthy of a wage.
Off my finger I yank that horrid band
That bound my wife to her master, Man.
On whiteboard I pen an emancipation,
Liberty for all members of femi-nation.
Mute, my wife watches, eyes pleading, “Don’t be dumb.”
Painful is her first step on the path to freedom.

It’s 11:23, my quest begins in cafe for another.
A mocha madonna asks me, “Room for cream?”
In my ear, Freud whispers, “Don’t bang your mother.”
On my tongue, I savour coffee, earthy, slightly toxic,
Black as ink off a map of a Congolese night.
Edward Said sighs, “White men lust for the exotic.”
I raise a newsprint curtain, pray my thoughts won’t enter.
I scan columns that support mighty Western cannons.
Chomsky-Derrida chant as one: “The margins haunt the centre.”

I hoped to find comfort in my last repast: reading.
But the words taste fishier as I kept feeding.
Every joy is a bubble exquisitely constructed
Lasting a moment — then it’s deconstructed.
My instincts crave passion, but I know that’s wrong,
At least according to Dworkin and her dreary throng.
Daly I read, Greer and too Irigaray
Who blazed a path for Ms. Hate, Rowling, J.K.
Blurring binaries is a prof’s required performative,
A mental flex strangely heteronormative.
Breached is the wall that keeps art high from low,
Bach from rock (but not yet, yes from no).
It’s all systems of meaning, texts of infinite regress
Forget Shakespeare and study wrestling, I guess.
But I like what I like! Oh those fragrant, fleeting flowers!
Nature, growls Foucault, is but a mask of power.
My inner Satan pricks me to act heretical.
Dawkins and Hitchens counter: “God is theoretical.”
After Camus and Sartre, I am rather annoyed
To inherit nothing but a big fat void.
I feel a twinge of conscience at what I’m naming; 
My speech act is guilty of horrid body shaming!

Lit. Crit. has reduced my pleasures to zero.
In my life-myth, I’m fried, villain, at best, anti-hero.
New Criticism is now quite old (how ironic!)
It made me detached and overly sardonic.
Wonder, magic, sublime awe and the rest,
You were once my food, but now I can’t . . . ingest.
Farewell fair Keats, and your enigmatic urn;
Blake, Shelley, Byron, Wilde too, had their turn.
The author’s been cancelled, done, he had his day
Unless he’s a minority or secretly gay.
Goodbye to the “soul,” “heart,” and “love’s secret fire”;
This is an age of mass-manufactured desire.
Honouring the impulse is a fatal assumption
In this empire of capitalistic consumption.

Yeah, Yeah, this is getting silly, I know, I know,
But reason leads to Auschwitz, says Adorno.
Indulge me then as I wax a tad mischievous
In the spirit of Carnival, it’s okay to be frivolous.
Sorry Socrates, the unexamined life is worth living;
Your dialectic is at times just too unforgiving.
Perhaps we should all be just a little bit leery
When art is banished leaving only theory.
Criticism is a scalpel best used to dissect
But life needs more than a cutting intellect.
If you sacrifice joy on the altar of analysis,
You will be (not be) Hamlet in full paralysis:
Melancholy, bitter, rash, and too, too sick.
Learn from Dionysius and dance to the music.
The beauty of truth exists beyond thought
And the truth of beauty can never be taught.

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On a Moonless Steppe

On a moonless steppe at midnight,
The armies of the ambitious Pang Chuan
March torchless through murk.
Night-blind soldiers stumble 
And stub sandaled toes
On unknowns in the pitch,
Cursing things without name.
Under blanket of darkness, 
They seek to surprise
The enemy, Pang’s brother,
The armies of the slippery Sun Pin.
Neither lamp nor starlight
Illuminates the ground.
In this swallowing void
Eyes cannot see the way,
But also cannot be seen 
By the watchful sentries 
Holding vigil in the shadows.
Night is an artist
Who paints all —
Family, friend and foe
Nymph, wife and Hag
Emperor, priest and serf —
With a single black brush,
The equality of oblivion.
By fingertips, Pang Chuan feels
A path forward, his hand pausing
On the gnarls and bolls
Of an ancestral tree,
Palpable as darkness itself.
His finger traces four edges
Of paper, tacked to bark
By four nails on four corners.
His palm caresses the silent
Swirls of an unknown brush,
Enigmas in the gloom. 
Pang Chuan calls for a torch
To unveil the secrets in the ink.
Soon sparks from a flint fly
Blooming into a brightly burning brand.
Half-striped in shadow,
Pang Chuan leans into the warm light,
Face as round as a new moon.
He reads the single line
Written for him alone:
“Pang Chuan dies beneath this tree tonight.”
His chest swells in shock
As he conceives the trap
He has fallen into.
Before he can douse the torch
The first arrow hits its mark,
Nesting into Pang’s flesh.
The hundred archers of Sun Pin —
Long cloaked in roadside shadow—
Read the sign
Of Pang Chuan’s reading,
And empty their quivers
At distant orange orblight. 
Pierced by countless quills
Pang Chuan speaks and then expires:
“In the womb I was not yet I;
By the eye, I was unseen and safe
In my mother’s cocoon;
From unbeing was I called into light,
Seen, named and sentenced to die,
I, the mighty Pang Chuan, I!”

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