The Situation




Many people blame Jersey Shore for capitalism,

that people have turned material into people.


They protest (too much!):


Where did culture go? O woe is me!! This junk

is terrible.



The implication is that they, standing on the outside, are better than these fools on Jersey Shore


but I say to you cultured people: these fools are better friends to me

than you will ever be.


I wear their bare feet in the junk
and know that there is love & stuff
inside our spider sac

of capital...



It is a warm and glowing womb — my childhood —

they dance & fistpump all night recreating it.


Surely these are our cultural producers,
and we should thank them

for being entirely constituted by capital,

for, Neo-like, taking it on




& still remaining human.


Mike, are you not the situation

of our own egoistic hopes, and fears

and logic?


You try accumulating girls

like your high employers pile up capital,


a capital which is based and created on you

and creates you. You produce new


human men in turn. You are an avatar

of masculinity! The gym, the tan, the laundry


of my radical, unsentimental dreams:


Mike — I enter you
and fray upon your seams.




When you break into pieces
(all pixelated in stock quotes and in prices)


like Mr. Anderson,

missing me in one place, you find me in another.


How can you be sure that I am not capital?

That this voice, as it seeks to intercede


&, through its rhythms, enter & destroy you


is not a new frontier of capital?



And in English, too!



Surely these words are a form of capital.