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“Animal Wink”
cc&d, v326 (the October 2022 issue)
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Unable To
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Running Out
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Shock Worker Poets Paleo-Radio Theater Manifesto #3

John Sullivan

    In our new/old paleo-radio theater we throw down to play well, to pay out solace & flux & soul from our throats / with our tongues - inside to the out – to stay perpetually, personally, purposefully, intimately small: no matter how wide the opening, no matter how loud the call, yes, very small / very human / very lo-cal-ly in a world culture that steady clocks & makes a god of more-more / that mocks & devalues small as irrelevant, a botched job, nothing more than a fizz/bomb/dud/no score that flat just has to yearn to someday dominate the play-space / to burn brightest, hottest, harshest, tightest / to tell me / us / you all what’s-what/& that’s the only way: in the very biggest, booming, all-consuming roar.

    So’s about this culture, my / your / our own culture, this shit’stem1 of precisely engineered/bracketed needs & ersatz other roadside attractions: it’s said the shit’stem reflects most clearly the spooky unseen hand / “free market” economy of nature. Is that so because it’s laid out so for babies & cravers & burgeoning grifters, alike, to see & grab onto that “umbral engram” like a theorem or a law? Or is it like a law because “thus have we made it” so to be?

    Is a commodity culture like mine / yours / ours that much different from any other sobbing cargo cult? Hey, we’re all dancing in it, right? We all expect something good / something different / something changing us to something more to drop down & penetrate heads & hearts like magic dust, or a blade. Cuz’, hey, we’re all still dancing in it, see, we seem to think we must, even when the beat is “stupid is as stupid does” / the bone-gristle just throbs on and on / & we know we’ve never got it (whatever it is) made / we’re not never gonna’ “cake-walk into town.” “It just is: it is, it is” I / you / we chirp together: cuz’ that’s how evermore before it always was.

    If such a commodity culture bleeds bots, monetized screams, drools lots & lots of once shiny artifacts & tools all mashed-up/stewed together in one eternal/spatial-temporal kludge, where’s the liberated self & other-loving words in all that goo? Where’s the dream-key to the inside of the cell: wherein dwells the ancient brain of talk-talk/touch/& being with, the wide-angle time-sense, the deep expanse of vowels & verbs / the sensory suchness index of consonants & noun-words? If such as I / you / we’ve made our stealth lobotomy culture - both a curse & a scary-bad dream child of this shit’stem of deeply organized / highly profitable yearning – then may our new/old paleo-radio theater come unhooked / leap off its chain to do its most important/major/potent yearning - in reverse.

    1 shit’stem – I cribbed this beautiful systemic descriptor from Jamaican Rasta patois to honor both the complex coded meanings & inherent beauty of this recombinant word. And to use because it’s so robust. And to acknowledge the elegance with which this word combines feelings of the strongest sadness (cut with penetrating/uncompromising contempt) for the world as it is - like a sentence of life on the outside – with a deep gestalt analysis of the glaring lack in that same-same world as it is, and an unshakeable hope for a next world as it could and ought to be. I don’t know exactly who the word first came from. If there is such a single point of emergence, I would guess the late Jamaican dub-poet, Peter Tosh.



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