FRAGMENTS
OF
ACCEPTANCE FROM REALIZATION 108
AN ODE
"Rerum concordia discors." 109
[ ... This first fragment consists of bits & phrases that were recovered from the body of a poet
who tried to drown himself at the beach but found the water too cold to go in ... ]
aluminum foil [pun]
crash!
crisp against
sandpaperbeach
doffed off The Furtherest
brooding at its dip
What's wrong with the World?
milk sunbathers
curdle under olive Sun
weeping its volatile violets
upon the shrivelled Worm
tangled in the liquid form
Earth crawling in th'hush of Absence
Silence at its xylophone
What's wrong...?
that sea monster
come (up) out of Always' nearby island
rippling up her teeth
through dolphins playing
the centrifugal's monumental
Oneness!
eyes bulging like reading lamps
ears furling
plugged to the robot tape-recorder
Life developing out from Form
forging gossamer
the foil sea [pun]
folds & folds
Th'Light's One Great Eye
snarling snails (in)
Beauty's inadequate embraces,
lobsters stitching The Infinite (with)
tongues licking The Heavens
from beneath
What's wrong with the World?
waves folding &
folding like thumbing through the pages
keeping aloft the bubbles of bronze
lips smacking busses
ugly into the open microphone O
passions pouring aluminum minnows
(from) eyes hiding like a brooding mother
amidst Melancholy's inconsolable monotone,
Was the wastebasket,
Wish without inclination,
Old Age's matted heart,
Pretense's secret colors,
Evil's artificial toads,
The Good's baby gibbons,
Youth's lucid silly,
the seas' doomed drunks,
the land's flawed dolphins:
a new-hatched Intelligence
sucking its thumb
Pati necesse est multa mortales mala-- 110
all decked-out in my cynical tweeds
I look upon the tideless Eve
taming Distance's impassioned smiles,
building up Th'Brightness brick by brick
and find: a victory of sorts--finding Th'Years
have not worn it away (as rapidly as they have
me) and that Eternity can't
eat a wall out of this world
(as quickly as my flesh), notwithstanding that
... from tidbits of the brittle I have
renewed limbs forged within th'nights
--Of course you don't see them
being formed by hammers & by my loving too:
Your eyes only catch null leopards
after Answer's dyed swans
made of chrysanthemums--You only see
The Afterwork my limbs have done:
Earless amidst the Past's peals & peals
You only hear th'Future's music
when it's tolled!
So blind are you--not to see
Love's arbitrary streaks,
the (so) timeless
limbs at their work on miracles of
Wind's drugged bows
from the too democratic mouth
in its objective remarks
pathetic atop Time's ( themselves
th'mountains) parapets
Tomorrow cheating us
like some cheap adulterer:
What's wrong with the World?
What's wrong...?
Joy all its transmutations,
Grief its conjunctions:
rooting through th'roots below
above: sizzling medusas of the Sun
but, soft,
[Soliloquy]: To Whomever it
concerns (that Time) & Winds & Winds
& Time--behind--keep barging in!
(almost November's white maniacs
unremembered, Autumn's unmade
horror, the Summer's precise
dependence upon Spring, and
Th'Spring at its grope
like some abnormal Green (that
if we adapt poorly: it's our fault
entirely --For we are mechanisms of Adaptation
and THERE is the thing
that measures our Successes & Failure
... and closer to us we find: First, foremost
--Lost! going from pinball machine to pinball 111
machine like some marble inside th'greater
machine caught plain in the pocket &
nicked by a train, cursing my luck,
blessing my Curse: I live
because I haven't died yet
making its music of eternity
until we get a jackpot & then
rattling the hodgepodge
pots of our man-making
through th'self-stumbling paths
we spend The First Ever jackpot
of our lives
trying to get to The Second--Wait! and
Goodbye: I have been called away this
morning reluctant to launch its stay
(your favorite like a foundation)
--the Muses of my many uses
--the ever always all-
craving Subconscious trampling through Time's
transformations, critical, incurable,
I must testify at My Own Trial
(the purpose of which is not Merely
to seek to find me Innocent
or Guilty, but To Find Me [sic]
--That, my boy, is punishment enough)
notwithstanding Himself th'compromise!
reeking principles like pimples
& sins & losing watermelons in th'Meanwhile
that extrapolated Target (th'purpose of which
running to its conclusion--Fixity,
the crucifixion sans resurrection)... I
have tried to speak
What's wrong with the World?
--You know it, so wait!
But, don't let me go so soon
for my synthetic feelings (or yours)
O wait! O, I have tried! to move through
to my own synthesis, but you have interrupted me
The Moment you saw I was about to fall
into my Own Contradiction ( that
ceiling glittering above my Lack)
--about to contradict myself upon The Brink
of My Antithesis --O wait You World, just
wait, master rat of Destiny th'cat
locked into the intolerable landscape,
tried by The Unauthentic,
unequaled down the diminishing essentials
of life's silliest equivalences:
so ostentatious in th'terrains
so terrible! of the too transparent Apparents
& digging for Genesis
amongst the handmade trinkets
of Intellectual Byzantium
[ ... There was a fragment here, but it was stolen by a poet who would not
accept, although he could've just as easily resigned himself ... ]
What is wrong with th'World, with the World?
and et ceteras ... like
gentlemen stand our foundations of facts
like fountains--th'sirens like serpents
between the sounds & the sighs
whispering of pyramids our untapering prides:
th'mud-mountains desiccating in the unending
winds of miracles
agog in the disengaging Althoughs
I have tried to speak --And yet somebody's
got a racket going somewhere
... where belly buttons
bulge & Cadillacs convert to th'contrivances
of Social Facade in the backgrounds
of God-burning the disparate Dawn
thinned in its very intensity
throughout the unimaginable ages condensed
to a mere contemplation
--too fatalistic is our fun
he ran a-muck (Did he make much
money with it?) contained to
a cosmos of meaningless
occasions, "Our Rolls, James!"
in th'farandole rolling Seas of Sin
which is The Witch of Hewhohas-Hastaken,
a ride amidst unending ribbons of blahs
of bottles above their contents
--Hell without hesitation,
in th'care of The Chichona's
unrestored alternatives: sits like a sentence
the all-adjuring Judge
of that country
where O GodI'mPoor is spoken & God is
the rationale of The Rat:
November! (that fat cat)
some carrion Bird's
corona seen above The cordilleras--Higher than
Th'Human Eye can spit!
slashed to a ditch & dying
like some discovery is The
Dawn's nixing Sigh, O so decisive-
ly launching its thousands hunches
distilled into the Stillness
of our rarefied Day's reckless logics
stands: Th'Magic we understand
as trust undergoing All Pains
(for pure appearances) masters of the damn,
of Th'Humbling multiples O humanity,
ye well-constructed corruptions,
ye sizzling chilling Shadows
of all those grieving girls
the world's ages staging
inexplicable dances against The Ultimate Wall,
more often than less infrequently
ye preferred flies! the familiar's darlings
while The Wise Men of th'earth point to The Sun
(so blindly) as Culprit: the saraband of souls
looks further than there --always
footsteps through th'small--towards Certainty,
the too complex Complete, Sense sans solution,
lunging onwards like some Downfall
for th'too brilliant Dusk
of The Ghostly, predestined
Tragic--is the illusion
inside the dark subconscious caverns'
flickering lads joyously dancing The Lies
that link us all walls-around th'moonlight
in its mythical laughters,
the too brilliantly predestined Dusk:
I wish to know: What is wrong--?
all such inclinations their mistresses
perhaps... a Pledge?... maybe:
Just for the Hell of it
I'll make it to thirty --And then
commit suicide--But, no, of course not:
When thirty comes
... you have made so many pledges,
you have so many debts, upcoming appointments
& additional obligations... that if you do
(escape) Heaven, Hell, Cosmos & Coliseum,
Sun & Thinking itself
must tumble (ALL) to the rumble of
Huge Verse--You see how quaint it's
to make a rhyme
sound indispensable & sensible,
and yet Shakespeare imposes himself upon us
& Jane Multy & Johnny Much
buy up The World with their crummy (for them)
couple-a-thousands for THIS or THAT charity,
while all you and I can do is
go to Church on Sundays (to express our community
with Mankind, showing we are not above
participating in their most primitive superstitions),
yet we are always growing ever less
superstitious & so ever less willing
to attend ...
perched atop Shock
like some stuffed peacock pissing upon The Tide
of that ornament:
... Mortality
like an inflammation over our dried-up
(but) yet everlasting bones
of Judgment personified, deified,
ultimately rendered a joke, not so much
Subject, nor where it's at, or
where it came from, or will go towards,
nor its shape or size
but (as) the way it's put
Truth flounders upon The False se iudice nemo
nocens absolvitur nec de se suam
potest vitare sententiam 112, O ye Pride, pathological,
Any fixing's gotta be done...
ye wretched as the least roach,
ye love
like elegy,
yet Doom already upon its martyrdom
of worms pretending to be standing tall
as towers, but shuffling flocks
we think The Poem greatest
when it speaks The Truth (which is to say
if it speaks sadly while we were sad
or if it is but some joke
& we'd been feeling all along like laughing)
Then: everything moving monotonously
will be replaced by something faster
--Everything that explains:
by something more easily understood
--That calculates:
by something always much more accurate
--That judges:
by something/anything more capable of judgment
by far
--That creates:
by just about anything more creative
--That costs:
by stuffs & stuffs cheaper
( sometimes ) &
the result will be ...
A BETTER MAN than exists today
(and us, of course
Any fixing's gotta be done...
always), notions like pennies, dusk
declaring The Darkness cured
upon the acrid tangles (th'syntax)
of our troubled times
in the ameliorations of
either being left alone, or
lost amongst us all:
more wrong than radical,
more right than rational,
modern as Death
for chucking Changes at every chance
from the shoulders of his Gift of Greatness,
Man! parting his Way through th'praises
of life (the crazies among the daisies
bruised almost to Oblivion
too abstract even to track)
though almost extinguished in the very try
I wonder, in the Night
--While in the confidence of the apparent day
I feel I am an animal no more worthy
(to life) than th'least heroic hare,
trying to differentiate things from things
within the self-combining Cosmos
looking through the invisible windows of the Day
for any extenuating tenderness
extending purpled over the panoramas
rolling eternal interpretations like balls
of Silence, mortal through th'halls of my thundering
humanity... so diffused an universe
that it leaves the Sun in th'throes
of Th'Infinitesimal
(...
Yet in that darkness
universal there is a contemplation of Opinion
going almost beyond Death, almost into Truth
itself: that self-standing Light!
And reasoning out of this 360ø Awareness,
& seeing how Light itself lives without The Dark
of things, even as Death lives in
the very darkest stuffs of life) ... I wonder,
for, "it is now the very witching time of Night
when churchyards yawn & Hell itself breathes out
contagion to the World:
Now could I drink hot blood
& do such bitter business
as The Day would quake to look on," 113
in my dreams: I murdered the cockroaches!...
Or did I actually get out of bed at midnight?
Yet I did enjoy it, even though I was abhorred
at having to broom out their squashed Remains
(all those bitter corpses!)
in The Dawn after the battle, then was it [sic]
still Dark: And, I opened my eyes because I'd felt
a tickling down my leg--Was it leghair
returning into place? ... One always screams
at The realization! and writes
a truer Epitaph:
"... While I lived
I regretted nothing so much as
lacking yet more strength with which to hang on
to my whatevers (acquired)
& if there are any regrets
in Th'Grave... now my regret is
probably more fundamental (such as a lack of arms
to begin with)... Jumping from bed
the One Thing I did see (in The Darkness)
was that The Lights were OUT:
You know the feelings! that then come over a man
at that fundamental realization:
Do you believe in ghosts?
Is there a prowler downstairs?
Will they drop Th'Bomb?
Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile
tempus: 114
Becoming is the Present,
is The Truth, and
... ( that
was the wake-up call ): "I am so tired now
I could go out & dance," he said
Nothing's assimilated God, nor is there anywhere
anything Perpetual Motion
--in spite of the fact that Chance doesn't exist
in this unendable universe down to The Least
detail115
You misunderstand me:
I am not saying THAT I DID NOT SAY
(you said I said it)...
[ ... Please pay attention: Is he saying that he now says what he did not say
then? ... Or, is he saying that he never said it? ... ]
And th'strange thing about his dancing is
that when I am that weary I like to
sleep upon the waves of the calmest ocean
although you cannot see how I could go 'swimming'
for rest--Stupid you! who cannot know
what I'm saying
... unshelling
Th'Distance--this whole Universe
of yours, of mine, is but A Single Photon
in some unimaginably vaster World;
and WHAT CREATURE struck th'match
that created This tiny Cosmic Photon of ours
in what Dark? to check WHAT TIME
WHAT (too black a midnight of his)
in some confined, small room
--What does it matter!?! to us
... Was it ... God?
Or, was it some more primitive nameless brute
who, ricochetting a rock off some chance
surface (mindless with the Joy of throwing)
then went His way, wordless, thoughtless
--never giving that Spark even the slightest
thought, and was eaten by some other beast
countless eternities after that feeble Spark's
photons (th'numberless universes of which ours is but one)
crashed aimless and silent for all eternity
against the photons of His nearby Sun!
... Does it matter? really? Does it matter
how long the trip from His match! of our making
to the nearest wall around God
sitting there checking what time
(the infinite moment) in the dark
Is it yet midnight?
while our scientists dream forth
Tell us, sir, do you know? Do you know
what is wrong with the world?
... the so inviolable
& all too human Laws of a physics
that governs even God! with a
meaningless match at midnight,
so completely unaware, mindless of black walls
only a few of God's inches away from it all:
walls framing the cubicle where God
serves out His sentence (for what petty crime,
I wonder), patiently
--He has the time,
He can even hope for an early parole
... But, how far & how long a trip for our
Photon?... Does it matter?...
Not at all: In that instantaneous! voyage
doth This immeasurable All of ours
wither & flowers and falls, burning calm & timeless,
teeming with all our hopes
at once, the better for being too mortal,
dreams that must be brought out of Midnight
--Saying (in all the newspapers) how
The Neutron Bomb is better because
it only destroys people ( not things, and
people is self-closed
( Mankind
cannot be created or destroyed:
it only changes Form for the moment 116
--Thing may extend even beyond
Th'Inhuman around us
even into some incomprehensible God
His own self-justification)
... murder
does not touch Human Civilization
That which we've become:
which is what must be preserved at all costs)
I asked: Is Man that less important
than His works? like some grade-school teacher
one Summer afternoon too languid to demand [sic]
an Answer,
answering it myself: To Whom!?!
while corporate brains too clever to speak it out-loud
in a chuckle, think quietly:
"When was the last time we paid anything
for a man incapable of working...?" Such
is the culture of Man...
Something feeling as if it's climbing up my leg
--Leghair? & the lights suddenly return
as quickly as they went... always
to find Nothing you didn't already know was there.
But although you find yourself
so comfortably in bed... you don't dare
even breathe audibly (that the ghosts don't find you
by the sound, and you listen for the air-raid siren,
and for th'footsteps of the prowler
downstairs), wondering, always wondering
What is wrong with the World?
as you lie in bed ... How
planets dwindle to Decay,
all orbits come to end,
the stars devour themselves
and Universe grows old (until
all matter falls apart )
Aeternitas igitur est
interminabilis vitae tota
simul et perfecta possessio 117
--Madness!...
and the name of beauty is dust/
drops precipitating from th'tearducts
of A Statue stranded haplessly
between The Pillar of The Cold
& that of Flames--Sadness!
and 118 I close my burning eyes
--Relief! (so brief) ... The book I'd held
thus ( open ) with all my strength
now's closed & the mere tears upon it
drown me!
... because the most perfect,
complete life is not the most encompassing 119
but that one which best explores its own limits
while The Hangman's ropeknot (made of Mockery's
unimportant laughters) sways! up & down
& all around
--You lose your balance!
Dust & Dirt do not escape your lips
--which's taste is startling sweet!
so, wanting more, always: you incline forward
for the taste of (brief) Mortality!
and then all the ground escapes from under you
& dies away (screaming) upon the distance,
fallen: Thus do you reach those immortal skies
you were after & from there laugh!
at ... all those who laughed at you before
--You are The Universe! after all,
divorced from all significance,
swallowing the entire try, urgent
as any rogue, Exception to the basic,
Guilt upon its winking wake, thinking:
If there's any fixing's got to be done
Innocence the annihilation,
crammed into Because (that remorseless drink
debating/deliberating The Superstition of
Th'Essential ) ...
inoculated against those viruses
we make invisible with the name virtues,
implicit upon the conflict in its implication
that in the unending vastness of Primordial Chaos
some unimaginably infinitesimal chance/
randomly assembled momentary Thought (of Order)
congeals God into a creature of Law!
the delight that dulls us all
into our ordinary lives (except for
Beauty, left over) from the instant that made us
creatures of The Laws of physics,
Beauty remains always beyond our shackles:
something which we can frame only by
our nostalgia for Th'Impossible
--Because nothing is created, nothing ever destroyed:
Chaos fills the Cosmos infinitely up
to The Bounds of Law (at which instant
Order takes over th'universe)
and then Law holds down Chaos
... but one more among the numberless myriad
thoughts lost in th'tenuous
so-called Order of The all-encompassing
Brain (waiting to take over again
... at the decay
of Order):
You are The Universe!
and each cell of your body is a galaxy of Chance!
now there is Harmony quite in your being
(and yet always must you come to understand
--too late for recourse
--that The Most Startling Apperception
comes forth, firmly, when, suspended from The Fall
the Soul realizes its unbearable Position
& then places your frail mortal body
weighed by Certainty
upon unsustaining air! secretum
iter et fallentis semita vitae: 120 amongst
Such Wastes )
I'd almost forgot th'taste
(so sweet) of the Night's breeze--Vigor
tinctured me a hoary Haste
that threatened my youth a decrepiting rigor
prematurely, merely for the act
of savoring Th'Moment's hush
without acknowledging Truth, Fact
--And sometimes even sleep becomes a rush...
dreaming of Chance, personified, deified,
it's possible to imagine
Free Will wielding the formidable
matters of its own form! But,
had we th'means to accurately ascertain
every least factor that shapes our Decision
we would see how inescapable it all was
after all: Just as Chance doesn't exist
there is no Free Will --All there is
all there can ever be, is lack
of complete-knowledge (Ignorance extending
to Where We Do Not Know), or
Consciousness! our naked mortal flesh
making a dress of Conscience,
suffering th'staggering significances
we stumble over in the dark scenes of inversions
when we are most composed, placid
remembrances of The Strenuous Times,
thoughts of once being amid
tortuous places & stark climes,
dead futures' inertias --all induces that
silence-disturbing cough
that puts an end to All
Any fixing's got to be done, my friend
it's got to be done on us
the harmonies of that thought subdola cum
ridet placidi pellacia ponti 121
and th'Promontory beach
& those vacant waves become eternal
Struggle against Struggle reaching
the din of the numberless lashes loosened over the Soul
--So many suicides! for no reason
better than ONE (uniquely, singular) MOMENT
of being left solemnly, thoroughly alone
O vivamus, vivamus (moriendum est) 122
Moon choirs whitest melody
from Time to Time--th'sacred cow--I ruminate
over such waves, such blackened Sea,
inland--such distant palms which
(late) still waltz the breeze
And senseless Hate whets Wonder
at our strange Fate!... O Passions,
passions & more passions
besiege this Insignificant barbican of ours!
this paper Battlement attacked with flames!
while all Th'While inside lives
a ( nameless ) Adam deeply, somewhere, darkly
wishing its Fall! Why does it hold?
Is it Time's circular joke:
Do we exist only because we exist
upon (our) Mankind's Ultimate Moment?
never so much th'Dreamer trying to wake up
as the drowsy lingerer about to be mastered
by the Night... irretrievable
fighting The Universe, as its equal,
What is wrong with this World?
all: What is th'purpose to this life?
with the reply: "This sort of life,"
But, the key is not Resignation
always, those matters come too readily into it
--What makes this life?
There must be something other than,
something more than Rain, Dust & Sun
to what shapes Beauty's unfolding,
terrible and stark ... Or,
why must it endure? when
The Enemy may have come to liberate The Prisoner
asking, Is this life a fraud? Some dirty trick
of Irony--for we laugh laughing at ourselves
(weeping at the end)... bibamus,
moriendum est, then:
O thou gods beyond stars
I have beheld an ugly, cruel & sinister Countenance
so close to mine, O so drowsy (drinking
of The Past not just a past
& of a future not The Future) I was then
that I was handing myself over
to Resignation, that for a moment not Moment
scrutiny of this self-portion in Me
drove me to incline my Self
forward too much into the love
of Life not my life, and ... Almost,
almost my lips met hers! Only that
maybe a god not God won't let us be
too easily let-off, or that we cannot trust enough
to make a home (not Home)
out of the hospitality God is trying to pass off on us
as Hospitality... 123 Unable to stand it
I stood, unknown, uncherished, all alone
upon The Overlook-ing cliff around which
whiffs of white clouds paused
to halo it within the breezes' sniff:
There saffron Morning Dreams over me closed
& wild! my hair th'winding currents streamed!
while my uplifted & extended hands
fore-shadowed th'down-there dales screaming
clemency! for: their own-self relevant lands!124
--There was I, O Immortal over earth!
where Heights, where Cliffs, where Crowns unowned by Man
--Unique upon existence!... where All, birth
& death, seemed 'things' (merely) which come & go
purged off for their inconsequence:
Gorged was I all in garlands--to Th'Sky!
a Rainbow row of mad Magnificence
descending & ascending just to glorify
ME in My Throne!... as for my convenience
subjects of a world not World paraded by
--When, suddenly
I discovered, standing proudly as a god
beside me! on the baseness of his ground:
a desert gnat (which was just nowhere-bound
standing on pride)... his lowly clod
crowned with the 'halos' of my kicked-up Dust
that dry & dirty circled his confined Domain
--so prigly claimed from Pride by that inaugust
tiny beast in filthy arrogant chicane
--I was filled with repugnance, and my foot
crushed him down instantly to his True hollowness
Infinite Hush!...
And it was just then,
in such After-Silence, that in most destitute
alarm! I raised my eyes with infinite distress
[ ... the following fragment comes from a poet who at last found happiness in
a part-time job (mostly taken up with sweeping in a funeral parlor) ... ]
--only to find flucti flacciscunt, silescunt
venti, mollitur mare 125 --I had come
to where there were: Three Tombstones standing
upon the very abyss of An Empty Word
'round where no Motion could be sensed
nor Hope longed for ... And I must've been
trying to reach into Things shouted
for The Deaf to hear (such as Truth! Beauty!
Doom! & the rest) but instead
a word not (just) Word passed over me
without a sound, although filled with all Sound,
as I read:
Who can witness
The whole
(not just
going beyond The Hole)
Who can hold out
his hand--not hold
his hand ( just ): and
Who has heard
the Ocean's footsteps
and asked wherefore goes
it & Why--etc.126
--
Yet no more did I read (here)
impatient to read more
--all that There was
--And so I walked away quickly
almost out of breath,
to Th'Next-Most Immediate
Legend carved upon The Second stone
whatever, reading the following
there:
O, a Rebirth's in order!
But you will encounter
difficulty
trying to persuade some of them
first... to die:
And this one also read on, in The Silence,
but I chose not to read on here
too, there being a Third carved Tombstone
on a--head:
"Have many sons:
Some will turn out to be poets,
some will be Wisdom's ones
--Have many sons & some will even turn out
fools & idiots (like you)
and make you happy & proud...
While, too clever for this World, or all-
lucky: th'Bastards will drive you nuts--"
I buried my face in my hands & returned
to try to finish reading the First
Tombstone:
"Reserve no reverence for Truth:
Investigate it, study it, kick it about,
lampoon it, weigh it, challenge it,
attack it--Never defend it:
Truth can only be verified for a time
like everything,
then we outgrow it--"
But I couldn't look it in the face
any more & so I rushed away,
back to the Second Tombstone,
which read:
"Do not wait until it is
definitely established that
the apple also hath a Soul
before you decide to bite it--"
Backwards I staggered and stumbled
over The Third:
"... the only Salvation for Man
lies in a feverish quest for Improvement
& not in any cool meditation over the status quo..."
Which was another Contradiction!
& so I went on... to see if I would discover
how to go about finally discovering
the correct way of going about it,
but, there read only how,
the worst Rulers of all
have been The Philosopher Kings
(the most theological popes,
the most dedicated emperors, Alexander, Mao, Il Duce,
Stalin, Hitler, Shin Huand Ti & The Grand Inquisitors)
--Blessed be those nations whose rulers rule
but by/to their common men's laws..."
whose Kings love keeping
and do not so lustily aspire at fathering
The Law--"Omnia fert aetas animum quoque: 127
although a door opened for me--today
& led from Way to way:
I was There
yesterday, & I am here Today--
"Stay!" And
because I'd been asked, onwards I read...
... to observe Th'Evening sun set
in tranquility
& quite forget
that you have ever traveled far
th'meads of love & fields of war
here watch the clouds, in maiden shame
of darkness, go!
forget the blame,
forget the praise & the reproach
forget it all
here but to poach
the vegetation of a slow
demising splendid Sunset's flow
where you may from your view observe
the fall to slumber of the herb
and, venerating such Sun,
contemplate but (stilled) World's yawn
... to fall asleep under a sky
beneath which Life would smile to die
adverse to nothing worse
than th'most measureless of Verse
fond of That Most Important thing:
some small bird's senseless blazoning--
[ ... The following fragment was recovered from a poet who would not accept ,
and preferred to resign himself ... ]
And yet, although there was more there
( although there's always more )
I could go on no more...
Let this be my epitaph
& beginning enough: "--I did
what I though I had to.
If I was wrong, I was mad."
Here All men's tours conclude
& no one dies in solitude
(may die of it, but dies with all
who out of loneliness here fall)...
amongst Death's un-struggling sardines
Always more, all this, This All
I wrote (& this wrote me).
I tried abiding it for all my years
but could not, finally.
I tried escaping it, but could not,
finally. I tried ignoring it
but finally, could not.
I tried facing up to it
but finally could not--not finally
--I could not and could not
(not finally):
Love it, hate it,
praise it, damn it
--Save me!
"Stop: Do not give yourself away!
It's not Resignation, but
Acceptance!"
O Save me!
I wrote
over the hard stone of my life
like some epitaph
"I did not understand"
and: when I could not & could not
not finally,
then suddenly
I heard The Word, not just word,
and then no longer heard a word
no longer heard
no longer, no longer heard
making its music
as it dropped down Th'Mortal (slot
machine's) inevitable impossibilities
of Whomever-It-Concerns
in a Quest for The ultimate
(empty) Jackpot,
O, Resignation
upon which to survive that final Plunge
into the foil Sea folding & folding... [puns]
the depths of Man.