In Praise of Love (2002)
*Beat Poet Godard with a camera
and an idea
*you still make spoiled children
of the world
*though the frost on your halo has
chilled
*cry and scratch their heads at your
intense ramblings
*Poems and novels and operas and
magazine articles
*Is Spielberg involved?
*film and film and film and more
film
*Only in ways the American auteur,
this enfant
*that sucks at Hollywoods motherly
tit,
*could possibly be in grandmasterdaddynewwave's
film
*Godard visiting the grave
*the innocence of youth and the
old age of existence
*ruminations on the loss of adulthood
*not addled with life
*what is left when life is lost?
*black and white life
*the monochromatic vision of the
young
*filters into denigrated colorful
videotape
*perplexed by the pixilated vision
of the future
*blank pages of a book
*but no face evident
*turned by bodily hand
*no page turner in the world is visible
to the auteur
*whose hand, you may ask, is cranking
the wheel of the projector
*or, at least,
*threading the film through her sprockets?
*A young man, of course, barely out
of high school
*laboring incoherent in Spielberg's
America,
*a country immune, it would seem,
to famine
*but not to the horrors of war
*an American voice, bodiless itself,
booms at
*my mind, not attune to the matters
so typified here,
*the appearance of war
*etches elsewhere
*cognizant of film
*of my wanting of it
*turning your story, Papa Godard,
*of old age, of youth
*into my own
*Dig! in my mind,
*a woman is trying to make a film
*in my story
*not too distant
*future
*her film is a period piece
*it takes place in the past,
*in 2003
*she must cast a young man in her
film
*she meets a street hustler
*but no actor is right for the written
part
*but he too is not correct
*although she becomes enamoured of
him
*and he of she
*She instead finds her youth
*in a fast food restaurant
*working
*quite by accident
*the film travels around in time
*about the theory of the future's
vision
*although there are some humorous
moments
*of its past
*which is our present
*it is mainly serious
*like "CQ"
*There is also a scene where the
woman
*edits the film
*even further in the future
*I just turned 40
*I have aged
*I now understand what Vonnegut
meant
*when he wrote,
*"I have become unstuck in time"
*Papa Godard does as well
*You are still amazing
*Papa Godard
*I could not see your film without
all my sense
*and this unique history
*I call my mind...
*lodger
*austin 2003
