InVerse
At just first light in surge and drift,
Within the darkling seas,
In sheaves they swirled -- as winter mist
Evaporates in the trees.
I show you here one diatom.
God's smallest lamp of glass and oil,
Suspended in our ancient seas,
Then frozen far beneath our soil.
Beneath our star these diatomes,
Misprisoned cells of oil in glass,
In drifts descend into the sand,
And melt to stone while eons pass.
Within such stone they liquify,
And flow in streams through granite glades
To slumber in their vaults of pearl,
And dreaming dream the dreams of shades.
Awakened soul and substance now
What dwelt in seas then leaps to fly.
We see their shadows, cold as mist,
When contrails sketch our frozen sky.
I show you here a diatom,
God's smallest lamp of glass and oil,
That keeps us in mid-heaven safe
And warm above our winter's soil.
In life's first dawn they scintillate
And merge in death to darkened stone.
In sheaves they fade into the mist...
Unplanned? Unsought? Unmourned?
I show you here one diatom.
I.
Her sinewed arms bend oars downstream,
Her belly taut against the eddied swirls
And shifting shoals of sand and silt.
Soft plash of water against the hull,
As, on the lift of wind and loft of wave,
Her legs push and her breasts swell
To the slow rotating stroke on stroke
That guides her craft past rocks and reeds
Where bighorns graze and beavers slap the pool.
Her hair, rayed out, enfolds the sun.
Her downed thighs surge and shift
To the tempo of the current's heart,
And her shoulders roll, her shoulders roll
The long blue oars through shafts of sun,
Through canyons carved from time.
"If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea...." -- Psalm 138
WE RISE in a banking curve of pure velocity
over fallow fields and grids of neighborhoods,
arcing over ponds painted with slick scum oozing
-- from the oil pans of countless sunken cars,
-- from punctured sacks of toxic trash,
-- from fleshless graves of abandoned murders,
of missing persons filed in muck.
WE RISE embraced by first-class armchairs,
pondering the crisply printed histories
of yesterday's most meaningless events.
We rise up above our lives and lies,
above, alone, away, alas, good-bye
to families and to friends, to all terrestrial ties.
Our very cellulars, by strict law silenced
so that our murmurs not disturb
the delicate electronics on which so much
at this tremulous moment depends
that we dare not think on it, and so select
music of our choice from mid-heaven's jukebox.
The most enduringly prophetic Dylan song juxtaposed with images found in the Life Magazine Image Library, and supported by the extremely strange but somehow successful "Desolation Row - The Marionette Performance" by Vlamik, in two parts.
Continued...
Last year in the news: Dark-Matter Galaxy Detected: Hidden Dwarf Lurks Nearby? "An entire galaxy may be lurking, unseen, just outside our own, scientists announced Thursday."
Today on the web: "I do not understand dark matter." [Bird Dog]
But then again, of course, he does.
One yesterday, some time ago, in my journal:
Dark Matter
Love must see all things that are,
But not with any eye.
Dream must rise from darkling waters,
Yet still gloss clear and dry.
The heart must mimic life lived large
In its sentences and fate;
Accepting time must finally halt,
And enter through the gateless gate.
The body, all its time undone,
Must yield itself to air.
The soul, a dream no longer dreamed,
Must rise upon the spiral stairs,
That lead up to that heart of light
Which circles in that storm;
Where one eye sees all things that are,
Where that which is, is born.
Some say that snow is sleep. I say
That snow is but the rest
Of clouds upon earth's surface laid
To soothe the forest's breast,
To calm the souls that linger there
Beneath an age of leaf
That hides within it's brindle flesh
Whole galaxies of seed.
Some say that snow is chill. I say
That snow is but a shawl
Draped over stones of silence,
That such silence shelter all.
And in such silence seal within
The brook beneath the glass,
That when the spring shall set it free
All dreams to sea shall pass.
Some say that snow is death. I say
That snow is but the prayer
Said when soul in winter's glade
Calls the body from its lair,
To stand within the last of light,
Becoming less than air,
To leave behind what came before
In the shadows dawn prepares.
Chichen Itza
"What scaled and feathered fetish shakes awake our loamy sleep
in these sealed vaults where dust and sand enrobe our golden masks
that hover over dreaming faces drowned in tinted musk?
Here where the spider curls and chitters in the crystal locket.
Here as time's mouth leeches blood and brain and bids
the leather skin to tighten in on the empty, staring socket,
and bind the breath that fading far once laughed within the dusk?"
Here is your thin tin trowel,
And here your sable brush,
For prying loose these mitered stones,
And sweeping off the dust
That sifts between these shaded souls
Like paling ebony snow,
As you squat above the site
Where you worshiped once below.
Come thrust your torch
Through these shattered walls,
And map the stains on stone,
And explicate these distant deaths
From strewn patterns of bone.
The distance that such deaths define
Is measured by that ageless path
That winds up from the sea's last limb
Meandering to the blood's demands,
And, rolling over shells' sharp rims,
Finally finds its well-trod way
To midnight's flaming brands
Where vacant, lusting faces grin
Within masks of whitened clay.
This path slopes through the stunted woods
Where the mantis ruts and broods,
Then spirals down to the sacred caves
Where men in twitching files repeat
The witless chants of wind and waves.
"Thick curds of rancid smoke performed our genuflections.
Our flayed limbs writhed, then steamed in screams of light.
Our lidless eyes became one daring crow's confections.
Our shriveled nerves shrank back from the chittering coal's delight.
Our marrow melted fast as flames licked up our blackened bones.
Our gaping mouths spewed rancid smoke as if they would relate
the secret magic flint and steel on tethered flesh create."
Here is your iron pick,
And here your crested spoon.
Not silver, true, but still
The emblem of your art,
Which is, to wit,
To lay these bodies bare;
Explain their ritual agonies,
Deduce their sorry fate,
Describe their diet, sex,
The colors of their hair,
And tell how long
Their ashen lair
Has lain beneath
Our present pleasant State.
David Dubile: "While I was photographing them, leader of the group stood, looked, and then pulled to shore, pulling the whole group. The sea was calm and quiet. Something told, that we had better go too, and we did not have time to think about it, in the field of vision seemed great white shark. Australian sea lion - one of the rarest species on earth." -- FreeYork
Voyages II
by Hart Crane
--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
By the time Walker Evans arrived, there wasn’t much
besides the shrug of a tenant house,
sun-stiff shirts hung like paper-doll garland.
Red-clay road, a gash in the earth. Come evening,
an oak limb strew a negligee of shadow
across the barn. He’d never seen light
touch things like that, nearly prayerful,
the way it blotted roofs and wood floors.
It would prove as impossible to capture
as the odor of smoke, lye soap, and sleep
the children carried like clouds in their pockets.
He tried leaving them out, but to photograph
a field is to hold a mirror to longing.
Even cutlery kept between a board and wall
reminded him of them wedged in the single bed
Years later, a potbelly moon would spit stars
across Massachusetts, and he’d remember
the baby napping at Mrs. Field’s breast.
How, just before he made their picture,
she stroked a lock of blond hair and
launched, in the child’s dream, a paper boat.
There is in every photograph a secret
that implicates the viewer in someone else’s memory
of a pasture, a rusted sign, a dress pattern.
It’s what love does: makes room
for a boat on a tenant farm in Alabama.
All day he’d wait for the right light
on a stove, by which he meant to say
the effect of them on that place. Even long after
the grown child inherited his forbearers’ sleep
like the emptiness under the belly of the house.
Discovered by Daphne who says, correctly, This talented woman writes like a well hung, glossy shutter: true, tight and gorgeously smooth.
I.
The first time down the path
The cave is hidden from your eye.
You wander in a deep ravine
That frames a slice of sky.
PART II of GROWL
by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg
What Socialist Party of lies and slavery bashed open American skulls and sucked out their freedom, brains and imagination?
Democrat! Darwinist Solitude! NEA Filth! Pelosi Perversion! Obamunist Onanism. NPR racism! Recycling Cans to find unobtainable dollars to pay off deficit trillions! Unborn children screaming silent under the D&C! Boys sobbing for fathers! Girls for mothers! Wives for husbands! Husbands for families! Impoverished old men and weeping in the parks!
Democrat! Democrat! Nightmare of Democrat! Democrat the loveless! Gone mental Democrat! Democrat the heavy aggregation of girly-men!
Democrat the incomprehensible African-American electoral plantation system of perpetual ideological slavery! Democrat the skull & crossbones soulless Senate and Congress of corruption!
Democrat whose headquarters are Fascist overbuilding with gun slits! Democrat the vast bloating stone of Deficit! Democrat the broke government of the pauper nation!
Democrat whose mind is pure rusted machinery! Democrat whose blood is gushing tax money! Democrat whose skeleton fingers are in your wallet!
Democrat whose breast is a transsexual dynamo! Democrat whose mouth is a smoking tomb! Democrat of the atheist thumb pulling out a plum and saying what a free to be a very bad boy am I! Democrat whose only god is Dracula!
Democrat whose eyes are a thousand shattered factory windows! Democrat whose empty skyscrapers smolder in the long Detroit streets like endless Molochs! Democrat whose brains dream Utopia and choke in the fog of their flatulent dementia! Democrat whose fuming bongs and facial piercings crown the crapulous cities!
Democrat whose love is lust! Democrat whose soul is welfare and affirmative racism! Democrat whose poverty is perpetual servitude to the government salad bar, no seconds!
Democrat whose only true Doctor and Cure is Kevorkian! Democrat whose foreign policy is a cloud of glowing Iranian hydrogen! Democrat whose whore is BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!
Democrat in whom I once sat lonely! Democrat in whom I once dreamt the New Jerusalem! Crazy in Democrat! Sucker of crock in Democrat! Lacklove and lobotomy in Democrat!
Democrat of the Dot.com I've Got Mine Now Give Us Yours Centimillionaires! Democrat of Bush Derangement Syndrome! Democrat of the dried dugs of Ariana Huffington's Code Pink Synchronized Menopause Flasher Brigade known as "The View"!
Democrat who entered my soul early! Democrat in whom I was sold down the River without Huck or a raft and put over the falls of flowing ideological crypto-socialist sewage! Drowned in recycled recycled recycled compost of Democrat! Democrat who frightened me out of my natural freedom and into hive-mind chants of GLO-BA'ALWARMING-O-BA-MA, GLO-BA'ALWARMING-O-BA-MA!
Democrat of the planet has four months to live! Democrat of lies for the common good of Democrat! Democrat of crapper rapper lies of the soul! Democrat whom I abandon!
Democrat demanding that I give all to the State! Vomit in Democrat! Avenging Angels streaming out of the sky! Death of Democrat from above! God's righteous fire on the heads of Democrat-Acorn!, Democrat-SIEU! Democrat-California!, Democrat-Detroit! Democrat-Chicago! Democrat-San Fraudcisco!
Democrat! Democrat! Robot apparatchiks! Maoist czars! Evaporated liberties! Skeleton treasuries! Dictator judges! Demonic policies! Spectral communities of Democrat delusional control! Insane Democrat media madhouses! Olbermann suckers of Democrat crock! Monstrous media leg-tingle "analysis"! Democrat of presidential prop-up! Democrat of Journ-O-list talking pointed heads! Democrat of "Too Big to Fail When Failing!"
Deception of Democrat! Voters broke their backs lifting Democrat to Heaven! Payments fees now for unborn generations mostly to be aborted, for trees, for tobacco, for tilted windmills, for tons of things so bad, very bad for you we know better pay us now for Democrat death panels later! Democrat of Constitution as toilet paper! Democrat of blowing the cities and American land to hell in a hand-basket!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! hope of the world sold down the American river!
Democrat destruction of legal immigrant Dreams! Democrat of border war beheadings of citizens! Graven Image Adorations made to tin gods! Crack-pipe Illuminations crammed down the throat of taxpayers! Cap and Trade Religions! Democrat rowing ashore the whole boatload of sensitive socialist bullshit!
Democrat of a pale horse and the name that sat on him was Democrat Death! And Democrat Hell followed with him!
Democrat Breakthroughs in suicide machines! Democrat rivers of toxic educational sludge rising to flood levels in the minds of our children! New Orleans Democrat looting! Democrat flips and crucifixions of enemies, enemies, enemies flagged at flag@whitehouse.gov! Bill of Rights flushed down the Democrat crapper!
Democrat heroin fueled voter fraud! Democrat Epiphanies of mandated Abortion for all not just for choosy barren Democrat! Democrat Despairs of eternal urban ghettos! Six years' animal screams and suicide of the Republic for which Democrat does not stand!
Democrat Colonized Minds! New lusts for nothing and Democrat kicks and food stamps for free! Mad Democrat cashed-out clunker generation!
Free people despair of Democrat! Free people revolt against socialist utopia con-artists! Free people sound real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell to Democrat! They jumped off the roof! to vote out Democrat forever! waving! carrying flowers! packing heat! Down to the river of freedom! into the street of Liberty, armed and dangerous, Free people voting death to Democrat nightmare now and forever in God's holy war! Free people, mine eyes have seen the Glory!
Job Data Casts Pall Over Economic Recovery and nobody, but nobody, believes 9.6% is true.
Wall Street, NYC Photo by Vanderleun
ONCE upon a time
Making money was a crime,
And I was in my prime,
And working for nothing.
Now that habit's hard to break,
And what I got you wouldn't take
The time to steal. Life's so unreal
When you're working for nothing.
Working for nothing
-- ain't my act.
Working for nothing
-- an un-natural fact,
Working for nothing.
by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg
For Karl Rove Solomon
I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, and not looking too sharp naked,
bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour lusting for a Cialis refill and one black friend on the down-low,
aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of monied moonbats,
who warred on poverty and Blackwater's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship Zero!",
who on the Burly Bears float of gay pride bared their man-breasts and, he she or it, bleated their vaginas' mawkish monologues to John Kennedy's ghost under the Capitol Dome and french-kissed Mohammedan agents in the gore-drenched redrum rooms of Guantanamo,
who passed gas in grad school and on into universities with radiant meth eyes hallucinating President Barry O'Bama and Vice-President Joe Who?, envisioning world peace among the masters of war and stayed on and stayed on and stayed on sucking off the great teat of academe in unpaid student loans and over-paid professorial positions the better to molest the minds and bodies of children for decades with every third year off in Provance for bad behavior,
who were embraced by the academies and hired by the New York Times for crazy & publishing obscene odes or anything else that trashed Republicans or non-Unitarian Christians without regard for truth since there were no consequences for these posturing poseurs of puke,
who cowered in their marble-countered plasma-screened media rooms in smegmaed underwear which was no longer Victoria's Secret, burning their money by donating it in carloads to every half-assed Democratic POL that promised re-erections in Two-Ten without the losing proposition of actually holding an election, and listening to Rush Limbaugh through the wall,
who got bombed at public wine-tastings by chugging the slops bin and referencing Sideways, returning to their summer house in the Hamptons where they ate smoked salmon and each other, smoked $400-a-bud marijuana, wore $250 denims, paid the maid $200 a week before taxes, and bitched about how the economy was a mess but did not really, as they claimed, send their $36,000 tax cut back to the government, and continued to suffer the secret shame of Affluenza,
who breathed fire and bile about ungrateful "Democrat plantation negroes" among their cooler college comrades, and shut up around the one black friend they all shared, and drank turpentine to get through "A Night with Gloria Steinem", claimed bogus ego-death, blended health shakes from Cherry Garcia, seaweed, and the dried dung of Deepak Chopra, and Ab-Busted their torsos night after night that their butts might spread on the Le Corbusier sofa eternally after,
with dreams of Two-Ten re-erection victory without elections, with seven different mood-soothing drugs in the Ikea medicine cabinet, with waking Birkenstock nightmares of Bush, Bush, still of Bush, alcohol Jello shots and the soon to be sanctified Holy Matrimony of gay cock and deballings by their now not-so-significant others,
who blathered continuously about the Florida "theft" for decades after the two Bush terms while the One put one, two, maybe three or even four justices on the Supreme Court, but still not nine!, causing a million fatal air-embolisms during consenting acts of mutual Manhattan humm-jobs,
a lost battalion of a multi-million man and mom marching platonic conversationalists jumping to conclusions about WMD off fire escapes off windowsills off World Trade Center out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering "BUSH LIEEEEEEEEED!" forever after into deepest eternity, and moonbat memories and false anecdotes and eyeball kicks and yearning for the electro-shocks of hospitals and the briefness of jails and bring back the endless Bush wars that we may hate into our drool-cups again .... oh my sorry little schmos.... ,
who wandered around and around at midnight at the White House wondering where O smoked and Michelle hid her dildos, got the address of Obama's birthplace in Hawaii at 1776 Kenya Street and went there with fresh batteries, and found Barbra Striesand lurking in the lanai with Whoopi Goldberg and Goldie Hawn, all set on leaving no child's behind,
who had double-standard visions of fashionable footwear while their baby seals died, turned inside-out into a pair of fur-lined muck-lucks by Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton
who thought they were only mad when the second coming of BushHitler appeared in the clouds above their White House like the mother ship in Independence day proclaiming "Neener, neener, neener,"
who in humorless protest turned Hillary Clinton into their personal hand-puppet, which she enjoyed, and then complained that she looked far too much like the devil spawn of Howdy Doody and Alfred E. Newman, and that the fit was too loose,
who scribbled celebrity porn from scuffed kneepads in the offices of Vanity Fair and collected and shaved stray cats far into their barren Pecksniffian nights until that bleak Upper West Side dawn when, waking from their stupor, rolled over in bed and discovered they had slept, not with their sixth spouse, but with Barney Frank, and thought, "Well, that's an upgrade,"
who dreamt O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! hectoring and bloviating in the White House until in galactic luminosity Nancy Pelosi stood knock-kneed and naked on "Fleece the Nation" clad only in her San Francisco penis-gourd of flaccid played-out policies, while being frisked by a thousand agents of I-Am-the-President Obama, super avenging angel of the SortaSocialist Party, now and forever recreating the syntax and measure of polluted human prose, "Oh Hope!, Oh Change!, O Timor!, O Mortis!, Oh Yes We Can't!," and then all of them in their faded glory standing before America past, present, and to come, speechless and pseudo-intelligent and shaking with unshamed shame, a whole once proud party now doomed to decorate pikes and lamp-posts,
who were reduced in desperation after aborting their next generation to bribing the fervently fertile illegal constituents of wise Latina judges with appointments, with dinner parties, with caviar burritos, with $50 a shot artisan tequila, with cash for Cuernavaca clunkers, and invitations to bi-lingual and tri-sexual Hollywood "events," rejected yet confessing to the guttering sparks of thought in its treppaned Democrat skull as it proclaimed its new positive program for "Mourning in America," "Yes, yes, yes, like our patron saint Michelle-O-LaBelle that deep driving dominatrix of The Won, we too have a two-inch political penis, give us alllll your money, give us alllll your votes, give us ALLLLL THE POWER!, we and we alone can give you the golden gifts of our youth -- appeasement, defeatism, pacifism, penury, poverty and death!",
and rose reincarnate in the tattered rags of bluster and blabber in the tinhorn shadow of the ballot box and blew the the suffering of America's lumbering liberals' lust for unearned power into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone bleat still pandering for the Jewish vote after erasing Israel, as the American people, at long last no fools they, shived the elite in their entrails and blew them off again and again right past the last bus stop of democracy
with the absolute loss of political significance butchered out of their own body politic good to lose a thousand years.
Bright blooms of fireworks spattered shadows on our tide
Whose grasping fingers clawed into our land,
And scraped out slots like graves upon our sand.
A far-off signal flared and sputtering fell,
Its bloom of sparks splashed deep in slate,
But, like our last edition, this signal came too late.
The drumming bursts of broken cannons
Stomped along the edges of our gilded cage,
And faded like the lies we smeared on our front page,
Faded until all we knew of want or wish or war
Were the screams of our grandchildren slain
Beyond our gilded sand, our fruited plain.
Knowing
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things
We know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know
There are some things
We do not know.
But there are also
Unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
-- Donald Rumsfeld, 2003
To many, this seemed silly at the time it was first recited by the author. But of late it seems to be more and more prescient and prophetic with every passing day.
[Thanks for the memory to William M. Briggs, Statistician ｻ Rumsfeld and Keynes on Probability]
They expose the unwanted infant
On a hot flat stone, or throw it
Whirling head over foot into the ravine
For the raven's obscene brunch,
And walk back down
Their barren blasted Hill
To their village of rocks,
Hearing the mother’s moans,
Approving the father's stern smile.
All male, the state demands,
And sound.
If we knew the intent of the beasts that we keep
In far fields and dark valleys, in the pale light of sleep,
In marked shards of clay, in papyrus and parchment,
Beneath the brick hearth, in the marks on old bones,
In the marrow of bones, in the plowing of stones
Parting sand furrows where our dreams are pale sparks
In the roots of our nerves, sprouting to thoughts,
To the tee-shirt philosophies of cheap magazines,
And the afternoon shows of electronic dreams,
That drown our blank selves now dredged up from sleep.
If we knew the intent of the beasts that we keep,
We would surely sit senseless, would hide from the sun,
And turn on ourselves the unregistered gun.
If we knew the intent of the beasts that we seek.
If we knew the intent of the beasts which we slay
From couches confessional, in the stone barns of God
Where the soul's soundings echo the light in the sod
To our penitent minds; which illumines our stark
Hearts from within, that dazzles our dark
With His fierce pyrotechnics, with His animate spark
That glows in that womb where all yearning starts,
And yearns for the flare at the top of the arc --
But burns like dead screams flung down in the dark,
Like torches cast deep where drowned Incas decay --
We would know then this life takes place in one day,
That the beasts which we keep are the beasts of our sleep,
Created from dust in the long dusk of God,
That we know the intent of the beasts which we keep.
In London, last November. There are small laughs coming from the audience at the beginning.... and then the magic of this old master overwhelms them into silence.
Not found in the video here is the complete text for Cohen's A Thousand Kisses Deep
Continued...
"I think I know the warm place you allude to.
Just between the thighs, is it not, my lady?"
-- Frank Harris
1.
Copulations on candelabras draped in overcoats,
And illuminated by burning children,
Guide us inside for the pearl of great price.
Our questions and cards of aging identity
Have been checked with our hats at the door.
Within, in the gray steam composed of our breath,
The mongoloid's lips nibble the rose
That pulses and glows in the garden of meat.
No sound at all flows from the audience.
No sound at all but the wind over stones.
Surely some triple somersault is about to be performed.
Surely some deadly edged object is about to be swallowed,
To the death rasps and rattle of drums draped in black.
Surely some revelation is at hand, and it's promise,
A love without name, without years, is arriving at last.
We are decently clothed and seated quite primly.
We have read all the arguments and remained most informed.
We have all made it through to these seats, our reward.
To surge, or not to surge: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous battles,
Or put down arms against a sea of troubles,
And by withdrawing end them? To retreat: to fight
No more; and by retreat to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To retreat, to leave;
To leave: perchance to lose: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that leaving, what defeat may come
When we have shuffled off this Afghan soil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of a long war;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of polls,
The oppressor’s wrong, the talking head’s contumely,
The pangs of pacifists, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his swift exit make
With a curt order? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary war,
But that the dread that some would cry “defeat,”
That vicious accusation from whose bourn
No politician returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Nobel Committee! Wimps, in thy orisons
Be all my sins forgotten.]
-- By sooth it is by ye bardlette: neo-neocon »
Every so often I stumble across something that intersects with something I've written long ago. Case in point, photographer Kate Peters' 'home' and a long forgotten poem from 1992:
Homestead
It was found in the fog that shivered
the slivers of glass in the windows.
It was seen in the sheen of the moon
on the unworn wood of the floor.
It spoke with the slow, patient clutching of light
and tapped out the unknown codes of the flesh,
the indistinct worm of the years and the shapes
of desire, possession, and fate.
It was mute.
It was stitched in the spaces
of the wind's alphabet.
It was clothed in cool hands
gloved in wet weather.
It appeared on the paths
that admitted no passage.
It's rachety rhythms
were all made of match sticks.
It waited.
It's slashings were tattooed
on drapes of dank velvet.
It's gibbering laughter inserted itself
between doorway and jamb and continued to carve.
It's snickering plumbing
rotted the dinner.
They had left, they had left.
Indeed, they had left.
Of that all their objects would clearly attest.
"About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters" -- Auden
Supporters of President Bambang cheered
At a rally in Central Java Monday.
Iraqi security forces showed peace signs
Patrolling Basra Monday.
A boy beat the heat in a cool, cool spray
Out near Chandigarh Monday.
People enjoyed the coolness of the Tuileries
In central Paris Monday.
A Canadian civilian contractor relaxed outside
His tent at Kandahar Monday.
Volunteers sorted rubbish
For recycling at Glastonbury Monday.
A man worked stacking sticks
At a Yingtan timber market Monday.
Cliff diver Alain Kohl dove off
A bridge in Frankfurt Monday.
A priest held confession before an ordination
Ceremony in Switzerland Monday.
An Iraqi police officer kissed the national flag
On his police car in Baghdad Monday.
Agnieszka Radwanska returned a ball to Melanie Oudin
During their Wimbledon tennis match Monday.
Israelis collected vegetables to be thrown
At a demonstration in Jerusalem Monday.
An Israeli police officer spoke on his radio
At a Jerusalem shopping mall Monday.
A boy rode his bicycle on the embankment
Of the Danube River in Budapest Monday.
New priests prostrated themselves
During the ordination Mass Monday.
Spanish marines competed in the Fan-Pin
Military race in San Fernando Monday.
A woman displaced by fighting in Pakistan
Sat with her daughter at a U.N. camp
In the Swabi district
Monday.
Captions with their images can be found at Pictures of the Day
Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.
We'd strapped him to his bed for over a year,
Paid a fat, black woman to wear a white dress
Change his bed pan, and sit with him at night,
But when the bone white pigeon banked
Between the buildings in a pale twilight
The old man's brain liquefied.
Foam, whose tiny bubbles reflected my face,
Bloomed on his lips as he swallowed his tongue.
It said 5:47 on the red crystal clock by the wet bar,
And his breath rattled in the room like some
Tired exhaust fan from the Roaring Twenties.
His wife was out shopping at Woolworths,
Or trying to sell something back to Cartiers.
The black nurse was downstairs flirting
With Desi the tap dancing doorman.
Prince the chauffeur buffed the black Lincoln
And wondered what he do when the old lady died.
My wife was teasing our toddler in the living room.
Everyone else was trying to get home from work.
Somewhere inside his skull sore nerves
Kept sending signals down the spine to the heart.
I blotted his lips in that burnt orange room
As his arms flapped like a beached fish before
The fisherman brings down the club.
I turned from the bed, pulled up the beige blinds,
And gazed out the window wondering
Where the bone white pigeon had gone.
Then I called the Doctor's number listening
To his wheezing until the call was answered.
"He's dying," I said to the man I'd never met.
"You should send an ambulance and a team
Of medics right now. He's going. Going fast."
The calm voice answered from far across town,
"He's home. He's been dead for a year, you know.
We just change the sheets and pay the nurses.
I can keep his body going as long -- as long --
As long as you want. You need to tell me.
Look outside. How heavy's the traffic on Fifth?"
I looked down on a solid ribbon of oozing steel.
"Wedged," I said. "Hardly moving at all."
"Look at his eyes," the voice said. I looked
Down into his eyes and they had no bottom.
"Who's there?" the voice asked on the phone.
"No one I know," I said. "No one at all."
I held the phone and waited, looking out over the park.
"I'll send an ambulance when you tell me," he said.
The bone white pigeon came sweeping out of the light
And settled on the sill as calm as the quiet in the room.
"Send them when you can," I said.
"They'll just be caught in traffic."
When you walk along this beach
You take all that you can carry --
Dog, shoes, shadow -- even,
If you are not very selective,
"The Ride of the Valkyries."
And you think that because
You walk this beach
So easy and so free
That you will always
Stroll upon this sand.
Look up. A large black dog
Shambles and sniffs
Along this wet, black strand.
Eight dark ravens
Settle at the surf line,
And the drunken crone
Paws in the sand for a sign
Where there are no signs.
You're weary of all you carry,
So you leave it behind
In a pile upon the beach,
Heaped with the crone,
The ravens and the dog,
Hoping it will fade
Forever out of reach,
Becoming just one more
Bonfire on the beach.
by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg
For Karl Rove Solomon
I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, unelectable, and not looking too sharp naked,
bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour looking for a Prozac refill,
aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of moonbats,
who warred on poverty and Halliburton's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship Zero!",
who bared their withered breasts and, he or she, bleated their vaginas' mawkish monologues to John Kennedy's ghost under the capitol dome and french-kissed Mohammedan agents in the gore-drenched redrum rooms of Guantanamo,
who passed gas and on into universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating President Al Gore and Vice-President Noam Chomsky envisioning world peace among the masters of war and stayed on and stayed on and stayed on sucking off the great teat of academe in upaid student loans and over-paid professorial positions the better to molest the minds of children for decades with every third year off for bad behavior,
who were embraced by the academies and hired by the New York Times for crazy & publishing obscene odes or anything else that trashed George W. Bush without regard for truth since there were no consequences for these posturing poseurs of puke,
who cowered in their marble-countered plasma screened media rooms in underwear which was no longer Victoria's Secret, burning their money by donating it in carloads to every half-assed Democratic PAC that promised impeachment in a nano-second without the losing proposition of actually holding an election and listening to Rush Limbaugh through the wall,
who got bombed at public wine-tastings by chugging the slops bin and referencing Sideways, returning to their summer house in the Hamptons where they ate smoked salmon, smoked $200 marijuana, wore $250 denims, and bitched about how the economy was a mess but did not really, as they claimed, send their $36,000 tax cut back to the government, and continued to suffer the secret shame of Affluenza,
who breathed fire and bile about "that crooked administration" among their friends and shut up around people with real jobs and drank turpentine to get through "A Night with Gloria Steinem", claimed bogus ego-death, and Ab-busted their torsos night after night,
with dreams of real electoral victory without elections, with seven different mood-soothing drugs, with waking Birkenstock nightmares of Bush, Bush, Bush, alcohol Jello shots and the soon to be sanctified Holy Matrimony of cock and endless balls,
who blathered continuously about the Florida "theft" for the entire ninety-six months of the two Bush terms while the Evil One put one, two, maybe three or even four justices on the Supreme Court, causing a million fatal air-embolisms during consenting acts of mutual humm-jobs,
a lost battalion of a multi-million man and mom marching platonic conversationalists jumping to conclusions about WMD off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering "BUSH LIEEEEEEEEED!" and moronic memories and false anecdotes and eyeball kicks and yearning for the electroshocks of hospitals and the briefness of jails and the endless Bush wars .... oh my sorry little schmos.... ,
who wandered around and around at midnight at the Democratic National Committee wondering where Howard Dean hid his dildos, got the address of his love nest in San Francisco and went there with fresh batteries, and found Barbra Striesand drooling in the alley set on leaving no child behind,
who had double-standard visions while their baby seals died, turned into a pair of mucklucks by Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton,
who thought they were only mad when BushHitler appeared in the clouds above their Iowa Caucuses proclaiming "Neener, neener, neener,"
who in humorless protest turned Cindy Sheehan into their personal hand-puppet, which she enjoyed, and complained that she looked far too much like the devil spawn of Howdy Doody and Alfred E. Newman,
who scribbled celebrity porn from scuffed kneepads in the offices of Vanity Fair and collected and shaved stray cats far into their barren Pecksniffian nights until that bleak dawn when, waking from their stupor, rolled over in bed and discovered they had slept, not with their sixth spouse, but with Ward Churchill, and thought, "Well, that's an upgrade,"
who dreamt Hilary Clinton hectoring and shrieking in the White House until in galactic luminosity that crass and shabby woman stood revealed on "Fleece the Nation"in her SupportHose of pallid played-out policies, while being frisked by a thousand agents of Barrack Obama, super avenging angel of the Democratic Party, now and forever recreating the syntax and measure of poor human prose, Oh Hope!, Oh Change!, Oh Yes we can!, and then all of them in their faded glory standing before you speechless and pseudo-intelligent and shaking with unshamed shame, a whole once proud party now unable to get elected to high-school treasurer, reduced to bribing judges with dinner parties and invitations to Hollywood "events,"rejected yet confessing to the rhythm of thought in its naked and endless head as it proclaimed its new positive program for "Mourning in America," "Yes, yes, yes, like our patron saint George Soros, we too have a two-inch political penis, give us your money, give us your votes, give us THE POWER, we and we alone can promise you appeasement, defeatism, pacifism, penury, and death!",
and rose reincarnate in the tattered rags of bluster and blabber in the goldhorn shadow of the ballot box and blew the suffering of America's lumbering liberals' lust for unearned power into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone bleat still pandering for the Jewish vote, as the people, no fools they, shived the elite in their entrails and blew them off again and again right past the last bus stop of democracy
with the absolute loss of political significance butchered out of their own body politic good to lose a thousand years.
NOTE: By request, "Growl" is now in PDF format and suitable for printing: Download Growl Here [Back because whatever Larwyn wants, Larwyn gets... ] HT to Dinocrat's Howl 2006
.... a personal ad in the London Review of Books:
"The man with a genius For picking losers Is ready for the next in line."
Sort of writes itself, doesn't it?
"I can't live without you,
So I'm leaving today."
Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes
GOLDEN slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.
Sleep pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby;
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Care is heavy, therefore sleep you;
You are care, and care must keep you.
Sleep pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby;
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
HT: Patrick Krup @ Anecdotal Evidence: `In Poetry the Immediate Pleasure is Physical'
A Pen of Steel
George Pratt.1832 --1875
GIVE me a pen of steel!
Away with the gray goose-quill!
I will grave the thoughts I feel
With a fiery heart and will:
I will grave with the stubborn pen
On the tablets of the heart,
Words never to fade again
And thoughts that shall ne'er depart.
Give me a pen of steel!
Hardened and bright and keen,
To run like the chariot wheel,
When the battle-flame is seen:
And give me the warrior's heart,
To struggle thro' night and day,
And to write with this thing of art
Words clear as the lightning's play.
Give me a pen of steel!
The softer age is done,
And the thoughts that lovers feel
Have long been sought and won:
No more of the gray goose-quill—
No more of the lover's lay—
I have done with the minstrel's skill,
And I change my path to-day.
Give me a pen of steel!
I will tell to after-times
How nerve and iron will
Are poured to the world in rhymes:
How the soul is changed to power,
And the heart is changed to flame,
In the space of a passing hour
By poverty and shame!
Give me a pen of steel!
But even this shall rust,
The touch of time shall feel,
And crumble away to dust:
So perishes my heart,
Corroding day by day
And laid like the pen apart,
Worn out and cast away!
OBITUARY NOTICE OF GEORGE PRATT
GEORGE PRATT died at his home in Norwich on the 4th of June, 1875, after a severe illness of nearly three weeks. He was in the full vigor of manhood, being forty-two years of age, and had arrived at a period of his professional career which was most honorable to himself, and gave promise of great eminence and usefulness for the future.
Late last night I caught the second set of old Jack Reno down at the Black Hat Saloon. Jack's the kind of singing cowboy who can surprise you with a new song or two from time to time and last night was no exception.
It seems that even though Reno hasn't bought a new car in decades (He says he's waiting for his '58 Chevy pick-up to rust away.), he hasn't been entirely out to lunch when it comes to the price of gas and the nature of new cars on offer.
"Everybody's bitching about the cost of gas and yet they still got money," Reno said say. "Seems to me that even as expensive as it is, its still cheap when you think it is the price of freedom. Besides, we got more uses for our big cars, you take that Escalade they're making, than just driving to the 7-11 for a quart of milk and some chewing tobacco. That's why I wrote this song...."
There's these sleazy, mullah fellows
Want to rearrange my head.
Want to pick my pocket.
Want to slip into my bed.
Well, they better watch their moves,
Cause I'm getting in the grooves,
And unless they want real action
They'd better just get back,
Or they'll feel the positraction
Of my Atomic Cadillac.
ON THIS, the pretty much 38th day in a row of rain in Seattle, I (with all apologies to Robert Frost ), scribble off this short adieu.
I have been one acquainted with the blight.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain,
(And out in rain -- and back in rain,
And out in rain -- and back in rain,
And out in rain -- and .... you get the picture.)
I have been skinsoaked under every city light.
I have looked down every moss-choked city lane.
I have passed drowned dolphins on my lawn
And splashed them with galoshes unwilling to explain.
I have stood up to my kiester in the ceaseless plop of drops
When over head an scheduled cloud's deluge
Sloshed the houses with a mound of mist,
But not to call me back but slather me with slops;
And further still at an unearthly height
One more damned raincloud against the sky
Proclaimed Seattle was neither dry nor Right.
I have been one acquainted with the blight.
And so, like all other foul weather cowards in Rain City, I'm off to sunnier more semi-tropical climes for a week or so. Blogging will continue but, unlike this blasted rain, will be slightly intermittent.
IN THE KEY OF "You can't make anything foolproof because fools are so creative" comes this selection of subject lines from my Spam catcher. You've probably seen something like these subject lines in your own Spam Filter, but did you ever notice how, taken together, they make a kind of poetry that almost makes sense. It's like what might happen if Maya Angelou shared her crack pipe with e.e. cummings and opened her commodious capture buffer.
Here's a brief example of how to make Spam subject lines add up to a poem even Teresa Heinz Kerry would have been proud to have written after two bottles of Pinot Noir. All I'm doing is cutting a pasting and putting in a little punctuation. I call this soupcon of poesy,
"Not read of Genius"
Her lose the collate,
Or ask on provocative.
He start or latchkey,
Or lumber downriver the bitwise.
Ice try scurry.
Angelo try crotch.
Clarinet try remediable accretion again.
Subliminal may Edwin, may sooth.
Now some may believe that the origin of this poesy is a 'bot, but I demure. It seems to me that someone is coming up with these gems. Someone who once was a writer for either captions on porn thumbnail sites or foreign policy papers churned out by the Democrats. Either way, he's come up in the world.
"Original Dating are holding another speed dating event at Oblivion Bar on Monday the 27th June. You will meet up to 20 new people in one great night out! Dates last just four minutes each. Long enough to work out if you want to
see someone again and not too long if you don't!" -- Announcement, June, 2005
[with apologies to Alexander Pope]
WITHIN OLD GOTHAM'S canyons there dwells a shallow race,
That is only moved to mark and then pursue the face
Whose pursed lips promise much, and yet deliver little,
Except more cash and fame to the various lickspittles
Whose manipulation of the young is really quite refined,
And whose underwear is personally hand-signed by Calvin Klein.
Presented daily with an echo shrouded in a choice,
It surprises none among us that some presume a voice
That yaps and apes authority, and urges happiness
Can be possessed by the possession of a new designer dress
Designed and sold by Donna, or her many fawning friends,
That such a tiny swatch of fabric may yet cover bigger ends.
Armed with such frail weapons, these creatures nightly strive
To convince themselves and others they're vibrantly alive
To life and wit and wealth, and not just sunk in shame,
As in the bistros of the night they play the dating game.
This game is played by two who always seek to measure
The shortest distance now between self-esteem and pleasure.
The entrance fees are steep, yet still these fools rush in --
Each to take their turn, each to have their spin,
Upon a wheel of fortune made of money and of mist,
When I write blog
I am moved by strange whistles and wear a hat
When I write blog
I am the hunter. My prey leaps out from where it
hid, beguiling me with gestures
When I write blog
all may command me, yet I am in command of all who do
When I write blog
I am guided by voices descending from the naked air
When I write blog
A revelation of movement comes to me. They wake now.
Now they want to work or look around. Now they want
drunkenness and heavy food. Now they contrive to love.
When I write blog
I bring the sailor home from the sea. In the back of
my car he fingers the pelt of his maiden
When I write blog
I watch for stragglers in the urban order of things.
When I write blog
I end the only lit and waitful things in miles of
darkened houses
-- Apologies to Lew Welch who disappeared. (Wherever he may be, God rest and keep his Beat soul.)
Avalon, Catalina Island, 01/02/03
".... THIS MUCH I'VE LEARNED
In these five years in what I've spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear the seagulls call. They're going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds."
-- Jack Spicer, Imaginary Elegies, 1950-55
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the quotation feature at the top of this column. Quotes are a common element of blogs. The feature here at AD pulls a quote at random from a large file I've collected over the years and displays it whenever I update the page.
One quote in particular caused Amy, in the comments about Michael Schiavo's Song to ask,
Your quotation: "A woman is just a woman, but a cigar is a smoke..." I don't think I got it right, and you don't leave comment space for your quotations...drives me nuts... But here's the thing.... a good woman can make you smoke - before and after sex. A cigar can't do that.For reasons I won't go into here, this is another of the strange conjunctions of circumstance that have cropped up around here lately.
As for Amy's question, I agree about the smoking sex. Still there are many times in a man's life when a cigar is to be vastly preferred to a woman, and this evening is one of them. So I choose to, this day, celebrate cigars over women by lighting up one of my three surviving H. Upmann Connoisseur No.1's Cubans, and settling into some Kipling -- who knew a lot about women and even more about cigars.
The Old Regime
The tumbrils creak and rumble on
Within the roads of slate,
Retracing rutted years of sand
Whose distance storms debate.
Its passengers stand fixed as stone
While faces cheer from snow.
The blade awaits it's midday meal,
When above becomes below.
Innovations carved from clouds
Give despair and dance new measures.
The blade reflects its evening meal
When kings slake lower pleasures.
Arrived at now they gaze at mist
Where granite horses roam.
Their schedules as fixed as dark.
Their future white as bone.
The head within the basket sees
Vast parliaments of sky.
Its ears hear only fading surf
Where the past gone years reply.
BLACKFIVE BRINGS US A LONG REPORT FROM THE FIELD with the deceptively bland title : Air Force Pilot Experiences Ground Combat
"Here is a report from an Air Force pilot who was assigned to several operations in Iraq as the Forward Air Controller - the USAF guy responsible for calling in Air Strikes and communicating with the aircraft above a ground combat mission."It is more a memoir than a report and, although lengthy, I commend it to you.
By way of example, here's an excerpt from a long block of text that I've broken into a kind of poetry by this anonymous officer.
Do you doubt it? Take it to your nearest Poetry Slam and give it an outing, or just read it aloud to yourself. You'll see what I mean.
Something to read in response to the next strident reporter claiming to be the victim of soldiers much too quick on the draw.
These Are the Things That Wear On You
by Anonymous, Air ForceThe things no one really talked about,
or even thought about much:
except for one percent of your time --
when you had a free moment --
those thoughts crossed your mind
that you wish didn't.Stupid things like:
I wonder if going to the port-a-john today
will be a life or death decision based
on which one I choose, and at what time I go,
based on when and where
the mortars or rockets impact.Thoughts like :
I wonder if the piano wire
attempting to decapitate us
will be strung between the trees or telephone poles
along our route tonight.
Continued...
T hey seek a dedication
No passion prints on stone,
Their reveries -- of clouds.
Their benedictions -- moans.
Not one can name their masters,
Nor indenture's date reveal.
Doomed to ride the animal
That runs within the wheel.
1.
The last sound heard before the silence
Settled on my flesh in wisps,
Was the shriek of frozen ambulances
Wraped in sharp, revolving red.
Then two holes in my skull sealed shut,
And on my tongue I heard the tang of brass.
At first a ringing whine rose high and faded far,
Then bells began, each dun and laced with smoke,
And merged with walls of wind upon crisp water,
Bloomed high in white, white only, drifts
Of softly falling snow that falling softly
Blurred beneath all shapes of sound and speech.
The memory remained awhile, and moving lips
Became the signs of sound I could not see
To read, and all my mind filled not with silence,
But with dark brushed on deeper dark
Within which all stars died and dying threw
A single fist of sound beyond all song.
It moaned and chittered, groaned and sighed.
It grinned at me, inscrutable and blank
As shells evicted by the sea are spurned
By waves and parch above the sand,
Polished first by dust, then honed by rain,
Into whitened replicas of stone.
2.
Made new, I loved large gestures.
Marked furrowed face and curl of lip.
Memorized the signing hands that stripped
My half-guessed comprehension bare,
And learned at last to wait upon a glance,
Upon small words scratched on slate.
As days to years enlarged their rule,
All records writ within my skull were smudged,
All songs and music drifted off to send
Pale emblems of their realms as tribute
To the stone that once had formed a throne,
Now crowned with unsensed pleasures shrugged.
All treasure spent, all gems decayed,
All metals melded into dust, all trace of walls
Where once the filigreed firebird sang,
And drums of heroes' skins were stunned,
Were now but shadows strewn as faint
As lines of light on planets seen from space.
And then, with time, all that too -- Erased,
And sands and seas swarmed over all,
And ruled at last alone a globe of frost,
Of ice, of snow, of sheaves of glass,
Until along the farthest strip of polished shore
One distant crystal glinted, gleamed, and chimed.
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
-- Sir Walter Scott - The Lay of the Last Minstrel - Canto VI
by Carl Sandburg
Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
"Where to? what next?"
"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings."
(Sung a la Neil Young:)
"There you stood
on the edge of forever,
expecting to fly...."
These days
Every day
Is a Great Day
Not to fly.
These days
Every day
You have to fly
Is one day
Filed under "Well, what fresh Hell is this?"
These days
Every day
You choose to fly
Is one day dedicated
To getting terminal in the terminal where you can check in but never leave.
These days
You get confused
Stuck in the terminal
Wandering and wondering
When it was that Yoko Ono began to look like every other old Japanese woman you see waiting in that terminal.
These days
It's a good thing
Everyone terminalized
Is unarmed....
except, of course, "Security" which, these days, is securing everybody obviously not Islamic and patting down that fat Hoosier over there, yeah, the threatening one with Down's syndrome drooling in his tinfoil wheelchair, or paging Two-Ton Tessie, the bull dyke who last found work with William Burrough's Naked Lunch Freight Lines humping ten tons of toilets over the Great Divide and down into Joplin, M. O., with her patented dual-control dildo, Steely Dan, as her only companion until she washed up here in this Federally-funded program for lifetime pervert employment that gives her a whole new career here at the Terminal, even though she's older now with prolapsed kidneys giving her an itch and a drip and a bad attitude which she employs when she steps in from her meth break to secure Grandma Moses with a polite, "Stand up, spread 'em, up against the clear plastic wall, y'all, and feel my big steel wand slide beeping up one thigh and down the other, over and under your withered jugs , you don't mind, do you, Grandma, well do you punk?," while Abdul, Achmad and the Mugwump sail on by to the Sky Club to take over the sauna until plane time chatting about how fortunate it was they kept that Polaroid of Tom Ridge and Achmad in the back of a Buick 6 up on Lover's Leap in 1996 angled just so you can see Achmad giving Tom his special wink as he performs his special trick called "Swallow My Sword and say 'Allah Akbar,' my beloved Infidel."
These days
I suppose
It was only a matter
Of time until
They started stripping off everything but your shoes, yanking out your gold fillings that were beeping the machine, sanitizing their blue steel wands, and whispering to the eagerly shuffling line,
"Your flight is boarding now
We've upgraded you all to first class.
Step right up for your cavity search.
This way, citizens, this way to the gas."
These days
If you're expecting to fly,
Just make dead sure
Old Yoko Ono boards first.
After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
-- Gary Snyder
LISTEN AS DYLAN THOMAS READS his immortal poem, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." [Wav file, 1.9 megabytes -- Patience please as it loads, it is worth it.]
May Terri Schindler-Schiavo rest in peace and God have mercy on us all.And Death Shall Have No Dominion
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.-Dylan Thomas
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