SAFI ALSEBAI
This fear feels anachronistic
“NO WORD FROM YOU FEELING LONESOME
KINDLY CABLE WHETHER ANYTHING NEW AUF
WIEDERSEHEN MAX”
—Max Horkheimer to Theodor Adorno
15 March 1960
All that is description
A genealogy of jilted subject-object relations goes
something like:
the sublime, the alienated, the uncanny
Relations of: property, domestication
The one who all they did was palm
escapes years later into a horizon of puniness
leaves no address no account no number I have
to find those too find like meaning like puns
Is the curriculum of
laugher canned, uncanny, or cannibal?
V-effect
Ferric or ferrous juice of life on tap from a samovar
Irony
Prague spring saltwater
The sublime, the alienated, the uncanny, the ambiguous
the grotesque
Property, domestication, failure, mystery
Give me a break:
remain in touch, which
sounds after all
like a threat from some modernist
The flute, the bat, how ungallant
The sublime, the alienated, the uncanny, the ambiguous,
the grotesque, the abject, the ambivalent, the pathetic
Property, domestication, failure, mystery,
collapse, optimism, inimitability?
What to do with modernism at the end of the world?
The only gift is that
my throat is sore anyway
Otherwise I would be gelastic
It’s what we’ve been taught to be
Safi Alsebai is a writer from Arkansas, where he also studies medicine.