How No Money Becomes Money
In 1974 Free Box Chic meant taking clothes out of the free box in front of the co-op in Monte Rio. A year later the free clothes were put back in the free box. The connoisseurs who took them out on the second round found them ultra-chic. All the holes were in the right places. Not long after, holey free jeans became scarce, as did the free box ethos. Young people bought new jeans, then tore holes in them. It wasn't long before hole-making assembly lines were manned by immigrants who found the clothes ridiculous. It was the Reagan era of hole-making jobs. In the countries they came from, the only people with holes in their pants, were beggars. Knee holes suggesting that the fabric was worn by performing oral sex, horrified immigrants from catholic countries who had spent their childhood on their knees praying for work in America. Making holes in american pants was not the job they prayed for. Not only were they alienated from their product, like Karl Marx said, they were enraged by it. That is the wonderful thing about America: you can hate the thing you're making even if you don't know what it is, because sooner or later you'll wear it. The transition from hippie free-box holes-twice-worn to factory-ripped holes took only enough time to employ three generations of americans. And that’s how no money became money. And social evolution saw people travel through the holes in their jeans from misery to luxury, from refuge to residency, from necessity to fashion. The free eden of holey hippie jeans became the memory of fantasy, aka advertising. The executive of ripping reigned in the nation of holes. The zeitgeist authorized the nation to make and sell what didn't exist. The logic of missing fabric had equivalents in language. Articles and conjunctions went missing. To speak with holes while wearing ripped jeans was the new language. Subjectivity vanished through holes leaving behind the suggestion of an activity that had once been perilous. Flesh looked out of these holes with google eyes at knee or buttock level. Sometimes smoke came out of the flesh under the holes like fumaroles and nobody minded paying for it, not even the hole makers who spent their money on the holes they made.
Passing Pipes Along Peacefire
when i was a hippie
and i was never hippie
it sounded like happy
and I was anything but
i was occasionally ecstatic
and often angry
but one time in in san francisco
in the mid 20th century
in a house of silent vegetarians
at a commune in the haight
i held hands with two jeunes filles en fleur
who were the reason i was a hippie
and sucked deeply on a pipe still wet with
the golden saliva the foam of aphrodites
on my left and on my right
and i regreted eating the kale and brown rice
because they nearly obliterated the taste
of their divine lips but the trace was enough
to keep me up all night in a kitchen chair
at the window covered with paper flowers
writing a poem in french in the hope
that one of them would slip out of the ziggurat
of bodies in the communal bedroom
and tiptoe nude to me to ask what i was
writing and i imagined that she sat on my lap
while the sap of poetry met the foam of her
and this is what happened they both came
out of the bedroom and tiptoed past me
to some german guy sleeping with his head
on the other window sill and they coiled
like serpents around him and made godly music
he was a real hippy i was just a poet writing in french