Wayne Koestenbaum
Conspiracy Smirk
will the pimple be seen as a subset of a larger magnificence
when Virginia Woolf played at the Town and Country Fox Theater
the alphabet disappearing
a dead performer is the most inspiring
the streets stop announcing themselves plainly
the fishmonger but also the street continuing
from Funeral Circle to Primavera Way
when the road branches off into an unknown land
down the edge path again
a new member of the horror club
honored by being invaded
honored by the house guests arriving smashed
hammered by proximity to the sink
the philosopher’s demeanor
when snow is blue
Stonehenge on top of him
because he likes that position as a dad
bucket conditions
she said I yodeled
stem glasses because you think the ending
is as noncomittal as the beginning with her jeans unbuttoned
for hippie comfort and morsels of dinner
shiny flat surfaces never washed
pretending she cared about the fence being smashed
dropping off a book for the sick kid
late De Kooning as symbol of the laden and the luxurious
and the emptied
luxury of being emptied by your deterioration
don’t reward him with the orifice envelope
when he was fifteen his father died
of AIDS he said and
this one is private
because you are alone on the hill
waiting for the drill team to stop practicing
eyes closed like catfish
in the days when I regularly ate catfish
you gathered in Berlin at the café
pretending he was famous as a dad or a stigma
the name became a demonstration of easy listening
101 Dalmations or sangria
were you part of T’s militia
taping up the debris into piles of dilemma
three stacks of dilemma pastilles
but I wasn’t the “I” she had in mind
she had in mind a different “she”
the “she” and the “I” collaborating on our tower of Babel
conspiracy smirk in the leather cathedral
a potage of self-abasement, doubly interesting because damned
Wayne Koestenbaum reads “Conspiracy Smirk”
Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published 22 books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. In 2020 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Yale’s Beinecke Library acquired his literary archive in 2019. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.