Psychic Nomadism

By Peter Lamborn Wilson

 

Green tea with cardamon. Ibn Khaldun

declaims the dialectic of the steppe:

“6000 years cuneiform & shit

have buried the barbarians too soon

 

“The tinker wagon in the knacker’s yard

a pile of fecal bile & psychic sludge

the tourist & the terrorist as twins –

boredom-nomadism hits us hard

 

“Why choose this strip-mall over that?

Crisscrossed with highways, mapped from outer space

a text-based life, the closure of the West

the RV world, the backwards baseball hat

 

“Consumed but never lived – no smell, no taste

no seasons, weather, grazing, music, milk

our rootless cosmopolitan is stumped

by fastfood cities sinking into waste

 

“A temporary nomad zone explored

but only in the land of hungry ghosts –

homeless cranks dead hobos crusty punks

can’t constitute a true Barbarian Horde

 

“The plan of Ghengis Khan: burn pillage raze

the city to a pyramid of skulls

till earth as featureless as living sea

at last withdraws its parasitic gaze

 

“The animals return in 2012

a prairie will restore itself in time

a Scythian mummy turns up in the ruins

& shakes Von Humbolt from his dusty shelves

 

“Connecticut assumes a desolate air

your wild boys on the move – the wire clipped

the herds roam free – is this the end

the urban Armageddon? Will we care?”

 

Taken from the unpublished manuscript of Gothick Institutions by Peter Lamborn Wilson.



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