Black Champagne
(work in progress)
Flagrant casuistries
By Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
Life itself, hurrying past, too swift to stop,
too sweet to lose….
—Willa Cather
Beware of a spying gaze in the blind wall:
The Word is bound to matter…
Do not set it to profane usage!
—Gerard de Nerval
Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t’epie:
A la matiere meme un verbe est attaché!...
Na la fais pas server a quelque usage impie!
—Gerard de Nerval
The Albatross
Last Tuesday, for kicks, the cachinnate sea-crew
Downed an albatross, a vast sea-bird,
The indolent companion of our wake, who lazily traced
Our ship's slippage through bitter breakers.
Once deposed to the common planks,
This king of the wild blue stumbled in shame,
Piteously dragging his white infinite wings
Like chalky oars unmoored beside him.
Winged voyager! Now dementedly frail!
O royal one! Now splay and exposed!
One sailor crams His Highness' beak with a burning pipe;
The next limps and mimics this cripple who soared!
The Poet is one with this swift prince of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest and mocks swart archers:
Exiled to earth's low hoots and threats,
His giant wings hobble each inch of his step.
—Charles Baudelaire
Dim NIMN
Saddam’s boys, fed lion’s hearts
And bad philosophy, were sent into the rape room
Under P.S. 106, Baghdad,
Same ground that saw a Ninevah arise
Same wide-eyed folks that made
A few of civilization’s unending things,
Set golden bird upon a ruby bough to sing.
“Not in my name”
shall we set, we
The people of Hamilton and Adams
Not for such names, nor for our own,
Forgotten since our civics’ texts
Have gone to rot as assuredly as Rome’s poems
Burned by Visigoths to watch
“Vandal Idols” on a commandeered TV
in the fumbled coliseum.
“Not in my name”
shall these be set free.
Not by us, the people of Lincoln and Paine,
Not with our bullets of inalienable rights,
Nor our hatred of tyrants,
Not by our strength, our success,
Not by our sure hand in a selfish world,
Not by our open palm
shall these be set free.
These same who crouched in a shit pit
Or were shot for sheer sport.
Power plus a few roaring lies
And arabist France is your firm friend,
Scoring oil off of marsh arabs’ misery,
Breathing grievance and flattering tyrants
alone in their ego-lovely
palaces of misapplied plaster,
walls caulked with exquisite fear,
real memories of friends, father
or sister suddenly dragged out at 1 AM
and shoved into the State’s Mercedes
and returned in ribbons,
eyeless, legless, earless, hymenless,
or not at all….
The fear of faces too used to fear,
Same faces Stalin made in Russian clay
Holding his neighbors’ feet to the fire
Or cinching raw hands in unforgiving wire.
“Not in my name”
shall these be made free.
Same Saddam, god-damn,
Who put a hit out on a retired president
And called Kuwait his “13th Province,”
Shattering desert quietude with lies,
Living detached as a NYT op-ed writer
From the eternal verities.
Same Saddam, god-damn,
Who paid suicide bombers’ families to live on quince
And retire to palm-shaded villas
After sending Sonny on to see Allah;
Same suiciders who put a two-fer hole
In New York’s presumptuous skyline:
Front teeth fell out square with 3,000 lives
As jerks in Jersey City cheered
And Palestinians rah-rahed in parade,
Making Gaza glamorous once again,
full of light, full of hope, full of song,
As know-nothing Americans knew, just knew
It was all our fault anyway;
Not even giving gashed Jihadis
credit for their kill, not really.
Same Saddam, god-damn,
…. I can’t go on without respite, without tonic,
A cool cloth for my lips, hot cotton
Laid on my ears, much abused,
Carbon darkness for my eyes, my eyes
That see in seemless verity
One nation, under God,
Riddled with raconteurs of the Apocalypse
Who never missed a payment on their Saab.
Allah, Allah, Allah,
Forgive these few, these free,
These blind men holding diamonds
Who think they’re weighted with bricks;
Forgive these few their compassionate disaster
Who see sorrow in a tyrant’s swat,
How sad his up-bringing must have been;
Forgive these few their huddled asses
Who buy the pap and propaganda
of the feckless press.
Allah, Allah, Allah,
Sear me with second-sight enough to see
What comes of free people with no will to be free;
Who shrinky-dink and containerize the globe
After pacifying panzered fascists,
Who set the Technicolor sights of Hollywood
in every human eye
And take air-conditioned flights
To the winds’ four corners
And hear half-good English spoken there
From some kid wearing Adidas
And yet do not believe
Fallujah’s on their subway stop
or Kabul is come to Washington.
Forgive these few, O Allah.
Allah, Allah, Allah,
Walla walla walla
Washington
No intercessor angel
No intercessor angel tends
On steps no other did commend;
No vagrant God adjourns
Heaven for what makes us mourn.
No pebble, despite eons going by,
Disincarnates a sigh;
Ocean humps in its gelid sack
Only forth and over, there and back.
Sins commissioned ere our time
Get writ as History, not as crime;
No insistless salve is spread
To comfort calumnies of the dead.
Ancient bitterness and vibrant strife
Impose no twinge on man and wife;
Remorseless immortals looking down
Neither laugh nor frown.
By Another Name
First the clouds were in a heap
Till even sheep could not sleep;
Then the palace of platinum bullion
Lost a shingle and was down a million;
St Peter loitering at the gate
Had no new angels to berate;
Gabriel tossed his trumpet aside,
Sad it tootled unamplified;
An angel’s anger at a broken harp
Is more melancholy than sharp;
Sunshine seemed insult above the rain;
The gowns, though clean, were plainly plain;
The heavenly host and lordly train
Were just a parade by another name.
At Ron’s
Yon oak’s entwined wi’ ivy,
The flag of our nation near.
All lamps unlit but neon ones;
“Open” booms the chorus.
The well as well is ivy-worn;
What creeps conquers what’s still;
Under sky’s half-mottled mauve,
And pinkening tumescence,
“Hello, hello” intones a radio.
Restless Quester
Neither remembers the stark start
when heart first advised the eyes
to see a friend a foe.
Meals at the table turned scattershot, casual;
Face leaned to books, lipping the small print,
you gazed aglow at your torn, beloved
golden “Dragon” magazine:
chatty advice about how to kill with stealth
or sail the astral plane on a budget.
Every confab folded
at a call from your Philly hottie, Maria;
seminal points left forever unpinned
among the live haywires of hasty love.
Once you grumped home
straight to your pigsty
content to yodel D & D cusses
at a screen filled with terror and fidgety limbs;
midnight found you miserably hunched,
a vulture clawing a mouse.
You click your friends together with a lassoed gesture,
circles of a single color under each pair of feet;
you hunt the haunted woods together,
crouch bunched at each blind sound
and die in the fine faith
of the necromancer’s talent for resurrection.
There you were
hunched under the overhead lamp,
slaying evil to exhaustion
but unwilling to do the simple, sullied
work that keeps us good.
The sounds of all the world came crashing down,
pounded from the tinny PC speakers,
an aria of Orc-growls
that crescendoed in a hash of static.
Were you Ulysses,
a grey bureaucrat lost at sea
and anxious to survive into the profit zone
of his misfortunes. Every crashing zag
ends in an ascending zig.
Unhappy over your sogged bowl
of Cheerios, you wept to make the minutes glisten,
praying that the twin tracks of amnesia
would cure your ruin. O the world
herself was bleak as ashes
that day. That day
you had swallowed the plot
that plumed with your departure
a blue peacock’s outburst fan
waving and waving.
It was months before I knew
you’d said goodbye.
Untitled
Some mystery ribbon wraps my ribcage,
Delicate indelible as a tongue’s remembered trace;
An infinity of feeling’s
Configured in your face.
As the world unwinds to blind doomsday,
I tighten my enlivening knot in your spastic grace;
Abode of reasons no Reason abides,
I live to die at your (still) side.
The Cactus
Plain green and parched,
Colorless almost, and almost hopeless
Knowing only the pure water likes to lie
Down and roll in the dirt.
A desert blossom, fathered on floods—
Sup by sip
My lips have taken
Drinking each ocean from your eyelids.
”Parting at Mid-Height”
Far from meaningless at the seams
A good poetic conceit
Sounds off each tailored inch of its dapper dreams,
The too-neat neatness of its pinched pleats.
Here, at the folded edge, a possible prow,
Self-reflexive style and raw wave mix [hiss],
Touching without changing their inner hows
In extended chemic kiss.
Part and part with sigh depart
To unpoliced provinces of woe and wait;
Crawling dawn defines two solitary hearts
Alone as egos, as isolate.
Their bawdy bodies switch embarrassments
Ere noon has come to pin their shadows
Under them; each witched wight
Sauces lunch “To-Go” with appetite.
Squib
Snaffled cuffs link my heart in chorus—
On baffled dream—seraglio of houris—
Oh never to awake from this bout of sleep
Though shadows squander themselves and sunlight creeps.
These eves are deep that shelter lonely eyes
Turned inward, bitter till self-horrified—
The odalisque tamed by dusky charms
Untongues the timid with her beckoning arms.
Dan Weeks and Gregg Glory
Cain’s Abel
“Brother, I’ve a shiv for your spotless side.
Authority’s glory. You glow in God’s eyes,
The only free thing who’s immediately obedient.
Unpausing panegyric to the Creator’s cabal!
Only the brainless, the recklessly loyal,
Fly fired in ire or sit titivating introiblios
At the unheard word of the Lord Our God—
Out-thrust from grace you go—a holy turd.”
Abel’s Cain
“Co-created creature inhabiting God’s grace,
How like two ears of grain we thrive from a single stalk,
Listening to the mystery that lights, at dawn,
At dusk, in sourceless fog or stippled night,
Our heavenly way.
… Oh, Cain, our cale’s snapped
That had our frailer lights attached, and now
Into God’s welcoming grace we each must go
By nether paths neither tended nor knows.”
Bitter Inversions
Milk scalds and hisses in the brisk pan—
Bread, spiced with vomit, rises as a gorge,
Hurling health out of heated darks;
Down the whole loaf, don’t nibble!
It’s the slack shape of a corrupted heart,
Clouded to black rye by my bituminous bloods!
Tear each end off like an ear!
Eat the sour words my soul has abandoned
And kicked into the scabrous vat!
Ringed with wormy eyes like a stowed potato,
Each eye splendid with pins as a voodoo doll.
What I was is cooked in this object,
What I am has sifted to the gutter;
So eat it, eat it! Bite and claw with damaged nails—
Swallow a tooth as you swallow my soul.
Choke on it, fuck, and rub the crumbs into your pants—
Drool a glum stain on your silken shirt;
Something icky and indelible
should be my memorial.
Crosswinds
The sails unsettle in the wind
Finding their invisible origins—
Small fear goes out along the lines
Tremulous to the masthead,
The masthead bound with iron
And set into the leaning keel
Translates each impulse into action:
To one action, always the same: forward!
Vivid Division
Vivid division of night and day's erased,
Remaindered to night and night.
Forlorn lovers of a half-forgotten light,
Moaning obscurer nouns
Announced in inherent dank,
Reticulated whispers that race the essential blacks,
We murmur rumors of ill-lit hope
In illegible littleness. But what of that?
Word and word, without rough referent, remain
Word and word.
If only light were a little less wanted,
The pang less keen that brings us to our knees,
Praying and palavering among stone pews....
Then might we our quiet consummation make?
Have easy breathing in a blunted cove,
Voluptuous sighs swiftly wrapped
In midnight velvets, weighted and wetted,
And cool contentment at the core?
Everywhere nothing? Our disdainful backs
Turned to the emergent sun, should he appear,
Vibrant and magnificent,
Unveiled and scintillant over a dwarfed horizon?
Repullulation
Disengage the Sapphic eye,
Unhand the hoary, knuckled clasp
Of sensate effect upon the spine;
Be stripped of skin, and of mere sense
Be shriven, till no feeling falls from flesh
At all—and in this zero zone
When bare and bathed in naked light alone,
Let some jolt of jibeless spirit pique
And have its flash in nothingness;
Let shape arise from faith for once
And remake these mere mirrorings
That offend the everything eternal in a man
As a bilge of dung become a monument
Makes the nose weep for grief
That it had ever lived to smell a rose.
Instead stand deaf, stand blind,
And in inner dark but grope toward wonderment,
And when again some flood of folly
Rolls along the living skin, some ache
Or burn of fullness at the lips, as a kiss
Aches and burns at once,
Let some new, green skeleton
Underpin and resist. Let darkness dazzle.
When I was well
When I was well the world did seem
Alive with myriad tempting mysteries—
Wireless winds that moved each trembling tree
Moved what spirit moved in me;
The light that lifted flowers from the seed
Bade me bloom and brighten in my new need.
But when I was ill the world did grow
Older and dimmer each diminishing hour,
Weaker, darklier waned the woodland powers
And crumpled came even the softest flower
To this cheek that felt it not,
This tear-dead eye that saw all ill
become one sizeless blot.
Now recovered and alienate in my taut boat,
I measure the world from within my moat,
A magic circle of moveless seas
Unfrozen and supple, but leadenly still;
Wind and light move, but move not me;
For I, I am well, but the world is ill.
Clytemnestra’s Ghost
“The rat I wrangled from my womb has wronged me!
Bit me! Bled me! Hear a mother’s cry to kill her kid!
Choke the sopping monster who goes glued to Fate
By my very blood! Sucked from my very teat,
milk and blood both—bitter, bitter!
O Aegiesthus’ ghost—where are you?
Hold my breasts and fuck me!
These same breasts that came with my pubescent blood,
Oresetes nuzzled—his skull-top as soft as his pea of a nose.
Unfinished he flooded into a turgid world,
Torn by troubling dreams; I built him from boy to man, I
And I alone touched him wonderingly, wantingly:
That this star should fall from my fuckhole….
Damn him! Damn him! What is it to be a mom
If men may treat their mothers thus? Curse him!
My identity’s stripped to ifs without him; without him
Numbered and known as my son, my son.
Hard the travail, hard the happiness, and now
hard the death-time
Of mothers and their motherhood.
Sleepless across the groined earth I groan,
Loneliness airless and endless. Not mother, but murderer
My son—that damned man—proclaims me to finally be.
His insistence on Justice is a sinkhole of sorrows
Burying his Mommy for God. Ah, God—
No; no refuge there; no clouds, no angels, no respite
For a woman torn and scorned. I’m jammed into my gender:
First, pollution of the menstrual punch, then sex
Wished-for in waiting, not sought in warm arousal
But closeted and kept close, moldy with hoping—
Thin mystery of the singing clit mixed with sorrow—oh!
Known then as Agamemnon’s woman, addendum to majesty,
That which cleaves and is cloven—flickeringly split in
loving—
His arms the margins of my seacoast—no more, no less.
And no woman knows another; slakers and takers of the
defining phallus—
Competitive finessers of the clamping circumstance.
Came Helen, and away went our hairy thousands,
All the wood echoing like a troubled drum.
Men marching into the sea! Seaborne, sea-torn,
So many with no fluff on their chins, little wrigglers.
War-widow I was then, alone as a lion,
Stalking the beaches at dawn, clubbed and stunned
By the night menaces; the sins of the dreamless hours,
My mind a shifty shuttle on no holy loom.
What was I in this absence of passions? Unkicked, unlicked.
No nobility rolled, lucid and lovely, from my hurt hollows.
I was uncoiled and void; knowingless, dirty, and numb.”
Red State Prayer
Dear Lord, help the heathens to keep their federal mandates
off of my state. Please, Lord, let them become aware that just because the
federal penny flows from the blue states to the red states that that does not
give them the power to make us join their progressive coalition of the bribed
and the coerced. Please, Lord, let them blue staters realize that before that
federal penny flows from the blue states to the red states via Washington D.C.
that penny first flows from our backs to their banks. Please, Lord, I am
tired of doing the bidding of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Hillary Clinton, and
Ted Kennedy, and unelected judges who pick up the legislative pen that able but
lazy legislators have cast aside in favor of windsurfing. Let not the least
accountable branch of government hold sway over the most accountable. Oh,
please, Lord, I beseech ye.
Congress sick with second guessing Jessies
Congress sick with second guessing Jessies
No firm hand on the tiller
No mettle in the men left at home
Only an orgy of angst
Belittlement of betters
Twist turn and angling for advantage
Small speech of exiting
No largesse of existing
No reasoning among the sissies
Just the vile knifefight for the voter.
The troubled insincerity of these actors in the round,
The corpulent self-indulgence of the American Left.
"The president proposes, the congress disposes."
Say the vivid idiots
believing themselves
Meaty deities in monkeysuits.
How God Hates a Freeman
How God hates a freeman,
How suffering is his every rainbow
—Even when we poor ants
Find some infinitesimal way of being free
He sends a scourge, an insanity amongst us
—Sudsy heads in turbans
hard hands anxious to cruxify
ready hammers and shiny nails
suicide bombers in clean veils
no dirt under their fingernails
ready to make love to God
The God who, ironically enough,
Is killing us in black batches,
By blood-mouthfuls, killing
And shaming us with his sharp scourge
—so clean, so new—
black champagne
Alertly lifts the martyr’s rifle—
Agonized prayer
awaiting divinity’s hit.
God never talks to the dogs,
the dogs never stop barking.
“I remember her blue burka;
Rough cotton; wife.
The trigger invites me…
And I see you, mad and scrambling,
insipid in your freedoms.
When God God God
crushes you
I shall rise.”
Fervid Superfluities of the Sun
What's done? What's done?
Day advances day under the clock’s gun. . . .
So little’s left to do but die and rot,
Whistling operatic lieder on my solitary cot.
Romans knew the days but trooped to zero
Teaching kindergarteners mortuary rhymes,
Heroes paused at their redeeming crimes
Defined by something, something against erasing Time.
We aim at one overweening abstract: Truth:
A volcano that we forge to raise the roof,
And miss the little deity Pity
Saucering stale milk to a crippled kitty.
When once we’ve sighed ourselves asleep: “‘Tis done,
‘Tis done,” there’ll be no dream that needs “Te
Deum."
To the Red Gates
A bold bolt of rose lightning
Bids me sizzling its chosen bowman be,
A filial Philoctetes
Despite of our history.
So few know the maiming game
Half so well as swollen love can tell;
Knotted lots of condemned confederates
Go rolling down the slay-yard line,
Conveyered to red hell and devastation,
Again.
What redeems the fugitive from his red pen?
(Funny, nes pas?) How escape the mirrored Mall
to slow roast in the hopeless Wilderness
Again?
Monet's mash of fabulous figments
hand-ground to red renown....
Cezanne's carnival of pink icebergs
sailing house-high intra-Ardennes....
Beethoven’s beaten TAA-DUMP,
or Baudelaire's lurid la-lahrrr....
All are the agony of gangsters
Throttled or thrilled by moment's
one consciousness,
Exhorted from the dumpy swamp
That beats and retreats in the fetid chest—
O soully broken brothers!
Taken in angina and angst, past mists
To see pantsless God Our Father
And never again live well as worms.
His love has hoovered your harrowed bowels,
His meaning's memes flay mincemeat from your lives,
Embattled brethren of the happy pit,
Giggling piglets skinned in velvets
Wanton wannabes
Voltaged with vim,
Summed nothings who see
The glory of Him.
Alpha and Omega, faith precedes
Phantom efficiencies of famine and feast,
Trust in the somethings our nothings provide,
Vomiting vacuums for lebensraums,
Aching for spaces no spaceman divines,
Only oh aum ah oh our holy um
Can freight the frigate
We sail to red gates
That frame the lonely bowman
Asleep in zero's nonman's land
triggerfinger itched by lightning
Blind Homer
Blind Homer
in his handicapped parking plot,
Driving eye-dog at the steel wheel,
Steel will in the passenger's seat—
Homer who haunted the agora
Shilling for shekels
his white whale tale.
Superman in his icy citadel
Pacing the slatted blanks
that mirrored, then hid
His moroser meditations.
Soulful foreign exchange student
Putting on parsed phrases of a play:
hanging a mirror-frame in stage-space,
Audience made the mercury backing
To a soul in self-discovery.
Fake Eagles
The Smithsonian's dusty trumped-up American Bald
Glares glass-eyed from its cement stem
Flightless adherent to its typeset caption
"This specimen typifies..."
White-cloth greatness fitted to a character-trait—
Gestures grand enough for "something"
Parodied into "plausibility."
Daring airs
Are glass-encased, and grounded goes the mobile soul
Once limber and viscous as a spiky rose.
All's choral,
Collegial lean-togethers, mediocre ochers
Detailing a dulling sunset—
Not the hazardous edge of new dawn,
Clouds, clouds "by the skyful,"
The wee eye a-glitter, an observatory dome
open to the cosmos
And more.
The great green agate door of Oz
Stands pried wide, stoppered open.
Shall we fall into the verdant velvets,
Eat the wheats sizzling in their millions?
Come, here's my hand,
toad-wet, willing—
Here's the heart-mouth pledge—
and the plunge, the plunge
that mimes the promise mum.
Down we float
careening reagents
ripped to splinters
and sailing anyhow onwards.
Once is never, never enough.
Our stuffing's stuff-enough to shape-up someone
Fluffily waffling in the mirror, a minor man
And his mirrored mynah bird
Sqwaking Shakespeariania
Or gakking on a dodo's feather
watery-eyed.
The Joy of Bastard’s Desiring
for Ken Bastard
An artist,
that vast patchwork of fictive facts
made irremediably human
Lies swacked to the black mat
Lies swacked by bilious bastards—
Hearing only the thin singing
of virile virtuosos.
Crucified, rechristened,
He takes blamelessly the name "Bastard,"
Owing no allegiance to parents, prophets, persons,
or miserly precedent.
Alone as only
in that thinnest singing
He rears and raves
Swinging pennants of pigments
Fashioning each fitful color with fidgets
To one indelible enamel
Alive in our mammalian minds.
Rip of fittest tethers in tattered weather
and off—oof!—go hallooing balloons
by blistered brain's lightest excitements
shaped—sheer veerings and vanishments
into empty Empyrean blues....
Brushwork unbowed and bronzed,
Blast after melodious blast
Blessing bastardly the seeming serene
Until all the thumping nothing
Is singing—singing unremittingly
the "Joy of Bastard's Desiring."
A Supposery
I thumb a dumb supposery,
Suppose by suppose by suppose—-
A samba of bit insistences,
Queries and questionings,
Quizzes and ifses.
A suppose is a suppose is a...
Limber lasso of Tea Leonis, looping and limpid.
Here I float ... forgotten and talentless
Among numb unknowns of words, spermy words
Fishing for finishes....
Each word a weight to sink the bait
Wriggling its links of heartbeats.
No knowing comes to caustically swallow
The proffered oblations of ignorance
—-Stiff wicks awaiting enlightenment.
Ignorant divots flay my driving field,
Each divot devoutly a prayer
To drive true
To some teleological terminus.
O Tea Leoni
Know my unknowingness,
Parse my pickled presumptions
And inscribe a prescription under each eyelid,
Some fluff of a fluttering antidote.
Stop these filaments of questionmarks
Swelling my throat like a feather boa,
Fashioning incertain alternatives
In my make-believe brain,
Aggrieved and giveless.
O salvé salvé
Moisten and close, clock and lock,
The click-if-click of my soiled supposery
Churning mud-dumb propellers
In bayous gone by
O salvé!
Pomp and Present Circumstance
Bad poets write the cowardly words.
Bolshevik importunings crowd the square:
“Hitler, fascisti, retrograde!”
Crow the opiated opinion-makers,
Loudly lulling “the masses.”
Children doodle decapitated presidents
Under the mildly smiling instructress
Stitched drip by drip
To the federal nipple.
Carloads of laughing fatsoes
Follow Rockerfellers to the rallying grounds
Laughing falsetto
Apropos of nothing.
Contumelious Carter, crass gasbag,
Pats the padded DNC box-seat for Lordly Moore
Smarming his way to fame
On lies and mallomars.
Witticisms stripped to shitticisms.
“The world is not as once it was!”
Cry the fanged bunglers
Sullenly sipping tomato puree
Where once the blood had come
fast and rich and fauceted.
Fighting a ragtag rearguard action for culture,
No fine-spun sensibilities appear
Delicate as Charlotte's web,
As human as rumor
That clotted democracy yet,
Matted and mottled with muds, might yet,
Yet might be, might still be
“Some Pig.”
“Flowers in the Dustbin”
The old trollop comes ga-lal-lopp-ing along
REPEAT
Loves unfiltered // varnish the knotted heart;
Loves laved with gravesores;
Loves by the score: love-love;
Love unadorned.
Shall the body bear its burning beacon
Unseeing
Into another darkness
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
The body on fire
And the mind gone on holiday
Mind mindless mind
Flopped on a rocketing toboggan
in windy Switzerland
The old trollop comes ga-lal-opping along
REPEAT
Why, in such a desert, this simmering wetness?
Why this, why this?
Paradise by the inch.
Click and sigh
of fricatives, force and odor
of opening a stawberry door
into endless fields, endless
All the skyline's a thin guise of fire,
My face a gauze over echoes.
A farther fierceness cinches my mystery ribbon.
Some tireless vine binds my inches,
Glug of bloods cured to fine rawhide:
From tip of finger to tip of toe,
Cocktip to nosetip, cinching the inches
Finer and tighter, cinched in and in—
Raw zones and moldy wounds.
A zero surgeon could not configure it.
A tightest kite fit for any breeze
even the lightest.
And I am aloft—
Coughless and visionless, seeing all.
No need to imagine your spectacular sighs,
Your ruinous cues, your fucked dugs.
Twin cinders for eyes and a stovepipe hat,
Body pure body, longing and troubled—
But starchest snow for all that,
Breast and belly pure cold, pure pure.
Thighs stark as icicles
pinning my insistence.
Two old trollops disordering the I.V.s,
Tripping past the bedpans, two toiling turnips
Unable to ever verily bloom
Save as tumors.
“Flowers in the dustbin”
... and all that ...
The Niggard Heralds
The inverted bodies hang themselves,
Interpenetrated, peeled
For us to write riven songs upon their skins!
Sullied sufferers hang themselves from a glass cross
200 floors toward heaven.
Bitter Christs!
Loudly you fly from flames to the asphalt,
Absent-minded of your mission:
Your religion has not yet arisen.
We may yet decide to be extinguished.
The gossipy mendacity of the Left
Aligning with bin Ladens
To win the miniaturized
Bickerfest with the neighbor; neighbor
Same as them, hung from the cross the same.
Orange flares
Line the flyway to infinity
Or incineration.
Coda
Here’s a brave man, indifferent to kicks,
Somber under DC’s browning ferns,
Ready to kill the willful killers
And treat his countrymen, confused
As the winter-wind infused weathervane
Like a drunken beloved.
Shadows of the Moon
When somebody wins
For whom you have it in
It takes a special sort
Of good-intentioned sport
Not to spike the victor's cup
With poison, not a drop—
Nor weave laurels in his crown
That smack of ill-renown.
When at the starting gun
Competitors first run,
To trip him at the line
Would lessen your own shine;
Should victory be yours
It was spoiled at its source,
And never would its flowers
Bear scents wholly unsoured.
To lose so near to one
A slick cheat would have undone
Is bitterer, bitterer
Than to lose by leagues and more,
To feel and see the rose
Having cut off in spite your nose.
But better far such bitter
Than cheat and be a victor.
To survey the contested scene
Serene from heights Olympian
And know you had ascended there
Not by what you did or dared
But by snipping short the wings
Of one, among eagles, king
Drives home a blinding nail
Through the landscape you surveil.
The sumptuous fete, the feast
Attended by man and beast
To celebrate your sip
From Nike's very lips
Augurs a sudden hunger
When your dear competitor
His cup to his winning host
Lifts up in noble toast.
How empty are such high scenes
To one whose victory's a dream
Granted only by slight and slant—
A gardener who but supplants
And cannot raise from seed the grace
That blossoms in the face—
One who never shall know noon
Unshadowed by the moon.
Slaves of Glory
The very astonishing hour has come.
The very astonishing hour indeed!
Green Heinekins, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas
---Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening.
Hosannahs invade the empty windows,
spurs of blacks, mysterious
As the tender invitation of the body.
Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift
Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips.
Sobriety has entered us
As mourners enter a white church.
Enough of this pathetic quietness!
This simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament'
The madness of faces full of 'sound judgement.'
I forgive all disasters, all accomplishments,
Every disguise that announces 'I am finished!'
Choking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty.
Songs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses,
The poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight
Mutes imagining laughter, I forgive you!
Pathetic quiet!
Bring tympans, wild sibilants,
Drunken elephants of sound, mists,
the harsh clangour of brass.
New eyes, new hearts, new senses!
Bring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels!
Why was one ever afraid of waking?
Eh! a little daydream I had in the haypile.
But now the new era has arrived --this moment!
Let us revenge the sky for an hour!
Let us run out muds of new births upon us,
And seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters--
-Dreams of incorporeal perfection!
Dawn leaves splinter in my eye
Enacting the death of Satan.
Vertiginousness in the closet!
Very astonishing!
Shouts of Blankness
When nothing is left but divinity
And each man shouts to the next: "Look!
We are become the human angels!"
Wings made fabulous-- disasters surpassing
imagination!
Abominable, the bricks of this image.
All will be re-constructed, in Paradise.
At the discretion of no God
Do I spin and unfurl;
What is the hypothesis of passion?
The inextricable answer in the diamond.
"I am the unnamable silver,
past continuation,
I march beyond continent and clime.
I sing without vocable glitter."
A death that was reasonable shimmers
Shining ignored in a dirty jade pool.
Men will that day become?
Men will that day become?
Tales and fables melt to insignificance;
Palaces disappear in a maze of flames.
Men will that day become what?
I woke up in an ecstatic ditch;
I don't know very much about it.
The disingenuous suffer overmuch.
The rhetoric of Democracies!
Very commendable!
And after the Sousas and oompahs....
And after the senses to emphasize
what blankness?
The Jazz Twitchings
1.
When I'm sad and bad
I get more madly glad—
With every though of you
My heart climbs out of view.
It's all because of you
I feel the way I do,
And you know it's true
You dirty devil you.
When the birds all tweet defeat
And my heart's under my feet,
I remember our December
And sing of wintry weather.
It's all because of you
I feel the way I do,
And you know it's true
You dirty devil you.
When everything is glistening,
Every heart is set on Spring
And all the birds must fly
Up from a Southern sky,
I only dream of you
And love the coldest blue.
In every kind of clime
It's for you I pine
Because you're so divine
Bay-bee!
And you know it's true....
2.
Bright and sprightly delightful you
when your train comes tooling
down my track
I know there’s no going back
to a life and strife
that’s minus you
oh no nothing else will do
but loving and snuggling delightful you
when the chill is here and skies are clear
there’s no thrill so near/real as you my dear
(there’s no thrill will be so real as you dear)
no chill can feel real
while I love you still
no snow do I know
while I love you so
there’s no thrill like the thrill
of knowing you’re real
in a daze I’m amazed
knowing you’re real
(knowing those glowing
ways that you’re real)
how you whirl like a girl
when the rain’s coming near
and you know that I’m here
thinking of you
More Bits
One swift Republican can tell twenty dumb Dems why their
positions are poisonous potions. Deep in their delicate deliberations and
demimonde demurrals, the Dems decided to divide their lazy loathings
Nobody lied. Nobody was asked to lie.
Disgusting, the disguised abhorrence, the self-lies,
"forgettings". of yesterday's newspaper, gone the history of
"the day before yesterday." Soft came the music as a voice
unscolding, vaporous, laden with scents, not
vaporous, empty of meaning, void of sense, the dirigible
collapsed that thought had held aloft yesterday. And society has nor compass
nor goal, the destination not a "blank" in the map, terra incognita,
but a hollow within, void solace, void service, care of
family & feeding a pay service, turned capitalissimo, as everything. The
gift that underpins all.... gone, Vanished and void.
Conclusions
NOTE: This was for Departed Friend.
Re-work into its own poem
No more can I turn aside with sunny face
When the shocks of life upbraid me;
No longer can I see in the casual stranger's face
Opportunities new unknown for causal love.
Whatever has brought me to this pass
Must heave me onward! Nothing without
Bears my trust as had our friendship bourne
--How easily!--as on a giant's back lighlty rides
A sparrow! heedless strength to carry all
And to tar all things with easy hope.
Far into the night with weariless footpad
We had pressed, uncaring where the journey went
So long as sojourn had no ending.
Suggestive shadows of rock and claustric wood
Held no terrors for we two; we two
Who knew our honest talk could shrink
Dark's impostures down to shadow’s sham.
Gone are those trusts, that happiness.
Now rock and dark (ay, and rust and rot)
Penetrate my nimble being like a pin
Whose first sharpness opens slowly into gouge
Raw and unmendable, flinching if an ash
Although cold as the bearing wind
Should light on its red openness, as if a brand
Had been toyingly poked into my open eye.
Now every face in my kind circle
Comes to nothingness or less;
For ain't it worse than all the loss
Of miser-miserable death to lose
What has no reason to be lost,
Imposed division, needless cost?
Who'll now reply to my questions and my quest,
Remain for dinner and depart a guest
As closely allied in the heart
As one who never did, or would, depart.