Fending Off The Conservatism In Adorno Poem by Ken Babstock

At the festering corner of Boston and Queen
The Tasty Chicken House clings through May
to its Christmas tinsel, and is not long for this world.
Sanctioned colour murals under bubble script tags
won't slow the winds of progress. Next door,
Wattle and Daub, a law firm of Newfoundlanders
or a crafts supply in keeping with the poultry theme,
smells weakness, softens its smuggest aspects
with miniature jingle bell over the gripey hinge.
Knot your scarf . . . comme ça. The Speech Pathologist,
just blocks from here, requests we enter through
the rear. Uck, ook, echk, esh, eesch, ess. Mushy dentates,
audibly aspirant at the front end, he's describing
the texture of the tuscan soup I made. Wading into names
he'll enter the depletion that refuses names.
Lower on Logan, near Eastern, the Weston plant
rolls out its bread trucks well past dawn. Rousseau
had that bit about brioche in his Confessions a year prior
to Marie Antoinette's arrival in France. Luxury
bread's now a four-pound cow pat of walnut sourdough
that petrifies by Wednesday. What class are we?
When did we last love music and not its function
as calmative or its causativity? He gets down.
Leather strop, lengths of chain. The white sky a light box
viewed as gaps between negatives of the inverted city,
bike lock, bike lock, first bank in Regent Park,
the auratic properties of this chapstick tube, and
damp stringy tree-hair peeled from the inner bark.
Guy Ben-Ner, from his tree house, said,
"in Wild Boy, for example, my son really does utter
his first English word on-screen. He gets his first
haircut and you see" — I'll never fully — "you see
him barely managing to dress alone
for the first time." What we mistake for popular song
blows out its hair near the window-mounted
air-con unit. Wet snare drum in the patronymic,
imagine seeing what's there. A turtle — softer meats
within a patterned armour — might be its patterned armour.