​Jake Platt​

HAVING A DIET PEPSI WITH YOU

 

 

 

is even more fun than going to Pilsen, Chinatown, Lakewood, Wicker Park, or any Loop

or being sick to my stomach on Wabash in my own Dérive

partly because in your monochrome ensemble you look like a better sadder St. Sebastian

partly because of my lusting in you

partly because of your love for architecture

partly because of speakers hidden in the miniature terraces

partly because of the secrecy our laughs take on before no one and photographs

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still 

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as photographs right when I’m in front of them 

in the neutral Chicago 4 o’clock light we are sitting back and forth 

between each other like a tree sleeping in its better days

 

and the show of contemporary abstraction seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

                                                                                                           I watch

you and I would rather watch you than all the paintings in the world 

except possibly for the Matta in the museum or occasionally and anyway it might walk away

which thank heavens it hasn’t yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move like any one else more or less reminds me of Yvonne Rainer

just as at home I never think of Three Ball 50/50 Tank or

at an opening a single drawing of Martin or Hesse that used to wow me

 

and what good does all the theorizing of the Post-Structuralists do them

when they never got a person to stand anywhere at all really

or for that matter Robert Smithson when he didn’t pick the plane as carefully 

as the asphalt

                         it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

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