An Introduction to Literary Theory

So cute!!! I’ll use mine
to cripple your enemies.
Texts are, in part, chained
to a political reality. Sorry—
my mom needs something immediately.
The author cites nuclear proliferation,
but could you not as easily
argue ecological destruction?
Yes, you could—I’ve had
that happen. Such a
British thing to say.
What matters who’s speaking?
We gotta be the barbs
in the wrists of their Christmas!
Unmask the hegemonies, dismantle
Papa’s shack with his 9 lb. hammer!
Who hasn’t encountered others
who other others
the same way? I’m not interested
in the truth—give me something
more profound. Chop up
the corpus, now reanimate it.
The making of many a villain:
super-duper busy.
I cannot even get people to reply to emails,
let alone have a child…
Thanks Tommy and Katie!
Good job, Katie and Tommy!
Party at Rico’s for Thanksgiving,
who says we
're not already?
That’s the text version of a hiccup.
Seriously, who doesn’t love hermeneutics?

Too Tall To Ride

Perhaps it’s because
I think it does
what it does
that it does
what I think it does
is one way to say
wish fulfillment—& yet
many big brains
thought just this.

Well, stick a candle
in your eye, there’s
no need to make a wish!
Descartes couldn’t
cogitate his way
out a stoveheated room.
O God, on second thought,
I’ll have your cake
& eat it too—
c’est trop délicieux!

Fiat Lux: A Heresy

Remember: simple words without clear precedence
often craft such vile delusions.  Once,
a light emerged in the Mind’s anterior
like a tremulous voice in empty space.

The words he spoke were unknown, strange,
but not nearly as much as his glance,
the way he refused to meet the thousand eyes
resonating in his mirror, watching, waiting.

Where to start? A clamorous din arose
with his first thrust, the initial breath:
pandemonium in a void of ideas, a glossy surface
marred with cleverness, stale solitude. 

When did he begin to deceive himself?
Never really; merely his games outgrew his imagination
with masquerades of their own, and never
did he know when to put his toys away.

Pigeons swung low across the road one day
as he wandered the plains far and wide
between the cities in a vast disarray,
and so many discordant voices chirped inside

him that the guardians of his dreams
dissolved into dragons, hideous birds
with frayed, startled wings,
disconnected voices with shattered faces—  

what was he supposed to say when the sun
snuffed itself out against the horizon?
He believed he could still make sense
of the void inside him, the void his garden,

why drown in the realization of fear and failure now?
Remember your pride, he told himself, before the crash,
in the dawn of your awakening,
when you first tasted both the fire and the ash.  





J S Khan has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of literary journals, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in BRUISER Magazine, BURIAL Magazine, Dodo Eraser, and Michigan City Review of Books. 

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