Poem For the Reified Mind

hmm, well... (Stockhausen, 9/22/2001)

 in memory of Hannah Arendt

"My background -- in one sentence: Outlaw"

--Kenneth Goldsmith, in collaboration with sentence starter Campus der Künste, 2015 

what happened here is -- arm out, pointing, slowly scanning

lips flapping under a pow of silence -- is a work of art that

once upon a time never existed, that administrators produce

daily without practice, efficiently, showing up the next day

to repeat themselves, a work of art that until LeWitt never

existed, it is imaginable what happened here, these workers

absorbed in their tasks, taking orders, giving them, numbers

tattooed onto wrists, entered into boxes, for eleven-plus years

six million people driven into resurrection, not all of us can

do that, compare like that, we are nothing, as composers that is