Two Minute Dance (for John Cage)

Whose circus jerks to attention
Of those so precariously concerned

In this ring, in the grooves of this record
A refusal to capture what

Time's body disguised
A precision meant to be obeyed

As the open approaches others
Based on an equal presumption

His timing a cross between Buster Keaton and Beckett
Yes. Comedy needs space – a precise place for delivery

And film is such an enterprise
It is a silent taunt - an admonishment heard there

Closing oneself off to prepare a sequence of images
As Cage consciously worked on becoming a nicer person

Regression quiets us as the germ
Before the human, before language

Spoke.  Shhh!  We're watered and grown
We feed and feedback

Your mouth needs a body
It needs to ingest the word or worlds of others

It needs to reject the “good taste” that “knows when to vomit”
Yes. The animal is a hierarchy of parts

Living off the more democratic vegetation
The singular hedge makes its decision

It solves the maze
Uncut from what translates

Beauty is what the parts do
Not what the whole is

Cage celebrates the finite event
A sneeze, the fidget of the person sitting next to you

To rescue music from its sublime failure – that is –
from our inability to grasp the total, the infinity of it

he instead induces us to sideline the subject
And embrace the singularity

To feel how an act of experience constructs