Jeff Koons Designs a Funerary Monument Against Coniophobia, or I Hate Nature, for Nature Abhors a Vacuum

by John J. Trause

for Dusty Springfield

Jeff Koons has finally built for me

A monumentum aëre

Perennius by closing in

Two vacuum cleaners, and within

This dust-free autoclave there stands

In triumph over shifting sands

A tribute to my victory

Against the dust  —  eternity.

With Plexiglas on every side

Abides my mechanistic bride,

Erect, and here an effigy,

That of myself in unity.

To raise up this iconic case

Contract to build a basalt base

And cause it to be writ thereon

DUST IS THE ENEMY  and anon

Write  CAN THE DUST PRAISE YOU?  and then

Inscribe below these words again

I’M NOT MAD AT YOU, I’M MAD AT THE DIRT

In prohibition of the squirt

Of anyone who near may pass

With insolence and dirty ass,

Who’d wish the basis to besprinkle

With filth or desecrating tinkle.

And let there not be set upon

My tomb some naked Cupidon,

Perspiring in his corpulence,

But have a figure sculpted thence

Of Mama Cass in mid-stage dive

Attempting with chaotic drive

To crowdsurf in her earthly glory

From off the top propitiatory.

To flank her plant two seraphim

Of shapely form and lovely trim

With wings that fan her fanny clean,

Some fine flabella for the queen.

So then to shield this hypostasis

Will stand a grand iconostasis,

And passing through the royal gate

Sweep up the mess of sin and hate,

And have the priests in Tyvek robes

Invested with aseptic gloves

Between two columns on their knees

Perform the final obsequies.

And from Ionic capitals

Will rush white doves and whiter gulls:

Fly in, fly out the volutes round

In peace, in sense, in sight, and sound.

JOHN J. TRAUSE is the author most recently of Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round, the chapbook Seriously Serial, and Latter-Day Litany, the latter staged Off-Off Broadway.  His translations, poetry, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including the artists’ periodical Crossings, the Dada journal Maintenant, the journal Offerta Speciale and the Uphook Press anthologies Hell Strung and Crooked and –gape-seed-.  He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, and Jerome Rothenberg and the page with Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, and Pope John Paul II.