Kilmer 2007: The First Runner-Up

I Got a Post-Modern Woman
Or: I Got Ninety-Nine Problematizations, and a Bitch is One.
Or: Martin Heidegger? I Hardly Know Her!
by Everett Patterson, CC '06 (if a poem can be said to be "by" anyone)

I wish I could find an old-fashioned woman,
The kind I could bring home to daddy and mommy,
Who likes to read James Joyce and listen to Webern
And loves Jackson Pollock and Salvador Dali

I thought I had found her; I'd actually done it!
When I looked in her eyes, it was more than a feeling.
We met at a modern museum exhibit,
The kind where they hang hunks of meat from the ceiling.

I knew that this girl represented the Real;
Between Beauty and Truth there was not one disjunction.
The flesh incarnation of Plato's ideal,
Lemme tell ya', her form really followed her function! (wink)

No Schoenberg sonata could sing my felicity,
Until it was silenced by vexing perplexity;
When I mentioned a world of Socratic Simplicity,
She spoke of a matrix of sprawling complexity.

She's so fascinated with knowledge and power,
She evaluates me when I do something dignified.
We went on a date and I brought her some flowers;
Instead of accepting, she asked what they signified.

Our romantic dinners are so referential,
I have a hard time keeping up intellectually.
Her conception of love is a vast differential,
And to make matters worse, she's unsatisfied... textually.

Now I'm not Saussure, but I have my suspicions
My cunning linguistics do not satisfy her.
No matter how much we revise our positions,
I can't seem to ignite her sigini-fire.

The bedroom, like Jean Baudrillard, is depressing
And when we Foucault, there's a lot of confusion.
She often will still be rephrasing the question
By the time I have already reached my conclusion.

She creates simulacra of fake spontaneity
Whenever we're doing the Jacques Derri-deed.
I suspect she dissimulates simultaneity
(If you didn't just hear what I Edward Said.)

And during our interrelational forays
She grabs Mr. Wiggenstein, refusing to let go.
She screams "deconstruct me, you Whore Luis Borges!"
"I Immanuel Kant!" is my Umberto Echo.

Our love's metaphizzled; I'm not sentimental,
But I don't want a girl who's so purely performative.
She needs to acknowledge a few transcendentals.
I'm not asking for normal; I'd settle for normative.

I feel like a chauvinist racist imperialist
Since this whole non-Platonic relationship started.
Why didn't I date that dialectical materialist?
I must have been Jean-Francoise Lyotarded!

Outchorus:
Got a postmodern woman, she treats me so mean (harmonica solo)
Got a postmodern woman, Lord*, she treats me so mean (harmonica solo)
She's the meanest old woman that I ever done seen (The harmonica solo never happened.)

*who doesn't exist except as a network of metanarratives