Justin Clemens has published poetry, short stories and critical articles on art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He is currently editing a collection of essays by Alain Badiou, finishing a book of criticism, and finalizing a poetry manuscript. Dead Wood The meeting has continued past its deadline. Dead wood is handing on dead wood to dead wood. There are clocks in the wood, the clocks are ticking, And the wood is the clock of all the voices. The voices are droning; they are speaking of languages they know they will never understand, and the dead wood has come home, the dead wood has uprooted itself from the dirt, the dirt unforgiving, and scuttled into the world, already dead and dying again and again, sad and not knowing that it is dead, that it is dead, that the roots are ashen as the ash of the seasons, the ash of the seasons. The generations are gone, have been over, are ashen as the roots as the seasons as the generations recoil supine, chance coiling the branches and the roots and the ash and the seasons unbinding, and the name of the holy one, older than nature, older than the gods, the stars, the earth, the ash, has gone forever though wood will not stop will not though the infinite silence crackles with the wood, its grey roots rustling here in the silence, the dark, and the silence broken now by dead woods dead woods sparing ash. Coffin I am building a coffin for myself in which my body will not be placed no matter how much care I take over planks and nails for the future is opening like an omnivorous hole and there whatever I would will is already defunct and will be so literally for ever yet is something more than a columbarium or perhaps less given the urns are shattered and no shard is incised with recognisable name and there are in any case no urns at all. I would feel more like Faust if I knew who he was and this enervated sensation is deepened by the fact I never made a deal and surely never succeeded in anything to think I now have to live or decay up to my side of this nonexistent bargain fills me with fear and bemusement in roughly equal proportions much like a protagonist whose name I forget two twists of the knife and overpowering shame or like Ishmael clinging to the empty coffin of his friend-other there on a voracious sea. The coffins I have built are not for me. Baboon One day, the monkeys come across a dog- Faced baboon. The baboon is scribbling something Indecipherable in what looks a log- Book of some kind. Despite the baboon being Extraordinarily unprepossessing, The monkeys are tempted to give it a kiss. So they lunge forward, ten thousand tongues wiggling, Only to be rebuffed. The baboon seems cross. "Keep your dirty paws off, you fucking monkeys!" Squeals the baboon, wiping its glistening snout; "I’ve work to do." It sulks and cracks some fleas, Then picks up its pen, and writes: "I will doubt Anything that is not clear and distinct, But will, by God, prove what can truly be thinked!" Jean-Paul Hey, "Woman is the chocolate of Being" means: too much makes you sick or fat, but it tastes OK if it’s got a taste for you. Fellatio wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but you loved cigarettes, even if they threatened to take your life and legs. Don’t get all bung-eyed about this, either; beauty is as nothing to coke-bottle lenses through which the unresisting world will rub its dirty hands to idiocy, and celebrate your failure at the keyhole which opens onto your unwashed fathers tearing and snapping at each other with their sharp little claws and residual teeth.