You don’t have
what they want to buy.
You’re reading Thomas Aquinas
on the corporeality
of angels, spiritual substance
made manifest through form,
and not even you
will buy that.
It goes in the back room,
with the boxes of used
quill pens, and the jars
of cold and hardened
phlogiston.
Crowded back there.
Arson might be
the answer, followed by
a fire sale.
Hot embers for
a quarter, bowls
of ashes at
a dime a pound.
“What’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)