Buddy Can You Spare a Paradigm

My recipe is a critique of my cake

An’ a Marie is my now Antoinette

This cogito stole my fluttering ergo

Butterfly wings illuminate my bake

Silhouetting shadows across my ego

Cross referencing guilt on my halo

Attempting to dominate this universe

With images of Foucault in a wig

And thus end my bold endeavour

To create another Eden with Lego

Structuralised (now there’s a surprise)

By an architect trained inside Babel

Baking dreams on some kitchen table

With wooden legs, like Betty Grable

(They don’t make tabula rasas like that

Anymore, or indeed a Hollywood fable)

The pyramid of intellectual architecture

Is the ancient regime of a deserted street

Abandoned by the inhabitants of reason

Packing their wigwams and their toupees

Heading for the holy coast of hedonism

And several types of celebrity fame

Before the tsunami hits the beaches

And all their circled wagons become pi

And are squared multiplied by their radius

So they know what their new address is

The principia mathematica of a post code

Is the new ancient hieroglyph of Being

(Homelessness is now abstracted non-Being

An’ I wonder what Foucault thinks Gautama

Buddha will make of that presage of gripes)

In the second hand of a karma salesman

Culture is now a mud wrestling poet

Dust and ashes a synthetic spectacle

In the one good eye of a periscope

Reviewing literature from the distance

Thus it came to pass and not waving

When our names were writ in water

Dripping sonnets for a live performance

Of rubble without a cause celebre

But Maria is still holy in the arms

And the eyes of her sacred beholder.

Author's Note

Looking forward to your review