The Dialogues of Our Age

We're reading Augustine's "On Free Choice of the Will" in philosophy, and I made a found poem out of his dialogue with Evodius + Lil Jon songs. Thought you might like it!

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Evodius: Please tell me: isn’t God the source of evil?

Lil Jon: Now back,back,back it up
a back,back,back it up

Evodius: From whom do I learn to sin?

Lil Jon: Stupid bitch standing there while I'm drinking my hen.
Steady looking at me, still asking questions.

Augustine: Do you think that learning is a good thing?

Lil Jon: Hoe, don't disrespect it.

Evodius: I think that we come to know only good things through learning. But if we do not come to know evil things, how is it that human beings perform evil acts?

Augustine: You have hit upon the very question that worried me greatly when I was still young, a question that wore me out, drove me into the company of heretics, and knocked me flat on my face.

Lil Jon: Drop dat ass to the floor you scared you, scared you.

Evodius: Adultery, murder, and sacrilege... who could fail to recognize these as evil deeds?

Lil Jon: Twerk something baby work something baby. Pop yo pussy on the pole do yo thang baby!

Augustine: Then perhaps what makes adultery evil is inordinate desire...

Lil Jon: Bend over to the front touch your toes, back dat ass up and down. Get low.

Augustine: All wicked people, just like good people, desire to live without fear. The difference is that the good, in desiring this, turn their love away from things that cannot be possessed without the fear of losing them.

Lil Jon: ...Brand new shoes, brand new tool...

Augustine: I praise and approve your distinction, for although it is tentative and incomplete, it boldly aims at lofty heights.

Lil Jon: I do it so good, I don't need nobody else

Believing In Ice

There's a glory in drinking your coffee black
and a heroism in puffing away like a smokestack through two packs a day
paving your lungs to make way for cars, buses, trains
artery highways

I did not sit down to write a poem
because this poem has been written before
over and over again

It has not been written by solitary mountains crumbling into the sea
but instead people etched it into back alleys, trash can jazz
when all night long the city sings in gradients
it has sprung into summer and fallen into winter

I'm not writing a poem.
I'm standing in a telephone booth at the end of the world.

There's a release in restraint,
but also a truth in lockpicks and scalpels
pornography and curtains
we're all looking for the final camera that's watching everything.

Here's my question:
if you had never seen it,
would you believe in ice?
After our hundred years of solitude, can you hear the hurricane's swing-sixteenth notes all about your pig tailed children and their love of nothing worth having?
Are you proud of our heresies?
And how do you take your coffee?