Something written

Here's something I wrote 10 or so years ago on an old Underwood typewriter displayed in the special collections room of this library I worked at.

"Change, mutatis mutandis, assumes ordinary means,
mundanely maintaining status quo anarchic relations static
in its inexorability, till nothing is the same as memory
serves to remember; the past, unrecognizable in its odd
costumes and customs, alienated from the artifacts
of the human condition, used and spent, becomes the shibboleth for
nostalgia, marketing and disinformation. If anything, the
examination of some of these artifacts, in their husks, as it
were, reveals a rich variety of pursuits, at times seemingly
negligent of the recognized clamor of the times, and at times
infused with irony: how small the mistakes of the past
seemed in their nativity, great goods abused and evils
nurtured--as today might be seen in fragmentation of
society, stratification of culture and re-emergence of
violence, ideological and unconscious together.

"What once were follies become worldly wisdom, masked by
consensus and commercial approbation. Hegel, saying that
history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second
time as farce, finds ratification in post modern gilded age
quandaries: the second house, the celebrity lifestyle, the third
family, and the car, plastic and mediocre, appealing to loves of
surfaces. What surfaces is what we cannot escape: the lapsed
moral fund of another generation's dreams, spent on margin and
moonshine, comes calling again in our very public privacy, our
predilection for the errant detail, the chivalrous minutiae of
politics.

"Note the lapsed insignia of our epic bygonnes: the scattered brick,
the rusticating masticators, and the off-bloomed rock garden
bouquets. And the purchase, a seen unsighted, for sure, eyes of
time holds the past enjambed and blank versus a present
obliquely irresponsive to urgings, proletarian and urbane. Again
the incredible abomination insinuates itself among the dinner
guests, suited sleek and polished, conversant in controversies
and consultant of swat, based in our own dark regrets. Inanition
under God, with libertine injustice furrow auld, as our forfeiteers
fore-swore unhsaven ears ago broad fort a knewn Haitian, that
that that that that which might be become that furture known
and absolved of perfidy, by any other name, a saint among
sinners, a haint among hinnners, We've found our lost coin after
alla nd what's valued demurs to some baser coinage, always and
ever more extent in the back ways of history.