WORE THIN
Blue the Commemorative times, man-mesmerized,
compassionate to the Cold, hot in the Gone,
in the barracks of turbulence, sprouting rips of red
at its drifting margins, around its embrace
and those who lack the right-colored spectacles
unable to see times as they are
plump crimson behind the Grim, Blue,
then, Christ-accomplished, strident, threadbare,
up there in the dishevelled Heavens raking the entrails
of our slimy shadows & rotting tracks
the remains of our ancient awful saints, of
Virtue's bloated throats,
Day's naked duties,
Doubt's dubious eggs,
Man's ringing ruin
over th'outworn flesh
Grief at its vinegars,
Dropt to th'grey
when the child's growth has reached Such & Such a state
that beautiful full wings of hawthorn start forming
at his frail back: then the base crowds will jump him
in the hurricane's impatient hair, in gossip's centrifugal
tongues, disaster's well-suited to a fashion, adventure's
directed chance
... overrun with sighs
like sandals that dress all our wrongs in th'wonders
of what's right, through a tragedy like a rain of thorns
steps a hustle of stings to keep down the Angels
trying desperately to stem the flowing daffodils
that blast the air even by stripping them
of their leaves-shaking wings
*
*
*
--Blue, of course, the rending dread
of Profit's pet (nostrils over the intricate
tulips of) Time: the savageness that will undo him
Prince, he will never yet get used to it
and will trust to the street so straight--enough to
cross it... maybe even double back against it
& cross it one too many times... self-swollen,
all backwards, streets brimming with himself
the dogs & braggarts homeless out of more,
awashed with Regret's ruined
And when the Blue Death's flood comes to him
and whispers to him: "You are a Jew!"
He will reply, "Of course I am a ME." He will never
survive it, Prince, blue. Blue to the teeth,
minced in the ultimate.
Those that survive make all the headlines:
"A Gang of Children
Kicks a Little Old Lady to Death In The Park."
Vengeance become its verge: mankind uniformly malformed
elements of the primordial loam
--And for Whatever
neurotic & psychotic reasons: screaming
like the samelong riotous Throw-backs
(to a higher form of debased Civilization
than human--which makes us so vulnerable,
through our slight sensibilities):
While savage, in the shape of the hunting should
(but only some supple slur) really: an insensitive lizard
dressed in insensitive skin like some grand monastic minister
the old woman (petaled a living hue)
incomprehensibly stands there incomprehensible
no 'human' emotion rising from her sunken eyes
and unable completely to appreciate the great humor in the irony:
For the children aren't evil delinquents:
they do not do it for profit or crime
but because there's no alternative left them.
She, temptress until done, does not feel--because
there's nothing personal in such attacks: they rise
out of that bottomless, eternal soul of man
beyond our conscious awareness
... she can
stand back analyzing the disembodied Social Symptom
beating her down, Prince, really, blue.
Actually, if here there's a tragedy
our sympathies lie with the kids
who were programmed for such futile, meaningless efforts
as these...
They being on the rack
shaking with Consciousness, their all-betraying
convulsions shaking them O to bits
they're trying to make permanent
some deep Blue unutterable emotion perishing
with their death-throes shaking the old woman senseless
only because she is the accidental witness
to their so violent Confusion ripping their souls apart
(while they try desperately to hang on
to Anything, anyone, even that old lizard lady
standing there by Chance) up-
on the shoulders of humanity's great Past
in condemnation of its Present.
And after the old woman's death: "Why did we this!"
(Unfathomable fancy) The only reward
for noblest Pity & sublimest Regret: sincere
forgetfulness--it was one of those things,
Prince, blue, we quickly pass over such things
because our too, too human Mind can't cope with such questions:
* * *
Anyone who tells you that he has the Answer's a fool:
because there need not be any Answer--There is no
inescapable Question, Prince, no inevitable point,
no unavoidable pursuit.
"To be" is (already) "Not to be."
Who can be without being? etc
What creature can be excommunicated from The Church of God?
which is pure existence (being)
What human being can choose not to be born?
What man can choose not to be human?
"Not to be" is irrelevant, blue
and not every universal riddle's solved merely by growing up...
*
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NEWS ITEM
(page 17c): "...
week ago a little old lady
froze to death in her apartment
after Power Company officials decided
to cut off her electricity because of nonpayment...
Authorities report that...
after a most thorough investigation, apparently
no one was found at fault, "Just one of those things
like mirror's exact affinities"--The woman's pet lizard
was also discovered frozen dead..." no one could tell us
which of the two least understood the why of things
But those respectable Power Company officials
are no evil criminals; indeed, our sympathies lie with them.
* * *
Look you there where sit The Centuries explored by Man
growing from himself & sit tight like threatening Volcano (mouth
with thin lips made of tissue strapping
th'explosive words, blue, remember:
The corrupted crops) buried upon countless wounds!
th'cabbage-heads sowing our dead designs
--here the forgotten breakfasts,
the bridges spanning with emotional rubberbands
the cottonball World writhing under desperate pressures
(frailest rewards): God's trembling purposes,
His Hand about to make its nervous pitch
with the bases loaded--attended with & by
attired-with-bonfires monks, charmed by & with
the cool proposals of the nonsense nuns
naked O to dissect History
down to its black charred old bones!
dancing the tunes of truth (abandoned,
here sit The Shudders beautiful,
believing & remembering) th'stridently terrifying Cold
of a being left to its utter self:
Blue, here with its singular guitar sits the still
unabandoned cowpoke blue & lonesome,
holding his momentous conference with Th'Night's
cosmic (dust of The Dark playing tenderest
dignity) till even the coyotes weep with their cries
for O the giant, touching Hopelessness of his Song:
"How dreamlike comes (the Day),
even after the conclusive Night"
when th'incoherent idiot of a Soul,
so undisciplined & unrefined, ever so indefinite:
dares to attribute the nameless indefinable abstractions
(of just feeling good--Could Soul but feel!)
upon the meaningless being: Suffering's
disconcerted saints tinkering with The Silence,
poets past all lines: Blue,
Man's attached to Mankind by his gonads
& that's why it hurts him to be human, blue.
* * *
O my mouth is stuffed, my mouth is stuffed (not)
with Truth from all sides!... I am lost in its identity
until all's a lie (from wherever, whatever) and only then
does life seem all all comfortable--least of all comforting
Amidst snarling divergences: How dreadfully Night drips
to the fantastic (nicknames of the closed Imagination! blue,
in the afternoon's sensitive destinies)
the great industrialisms of our civil Slavery
building on our backs (illustrious The Dust of) the shadow
of the rainbow's shadow... shadows (of wings which
any Wind can blow off) our minds
while we drink from the fountain of One Final Chance
at last barren, dry, sweating & swatting the flies
like smokes of our spent (after-lusts betraying us
into the hands of the breeding Industrialists
who keep us penned up, breeding
balance's) child, Echo his home, Passions his underprops,
sighing at the all-calming sight of the snow's ceremony,
listening with awe to the murmurs
of Autumn's butterflies & lilies celebrating Life!
upon the Night of Ignorance
(worsening the stock, blue, we make them mighty
with our numberlessly coming) at their call --our cue!
*
*
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'The real world' doesn't exist:
... people who are merely describing their personal neuroses
& think it's the 'real world' they're speaking of to you
You who are all you are, individually/collectively
All You Are is less an idea than some accident--So
blue! laughs The Songmaker: O thou laughter's lamentable
colossus laying out your length of tragedy
like some classical fallen column
that once might have supported The Sun against Th'Dark:
You've been done in by pettiness!... All your own:
It's not so much the earthquake that rocks your neighborhood
& leaves no stone upon stone... that has ruined you
---but th'little birds overhead
which flying above you: shit on your head!
* * *
your yellowing teeth falling to Dust
envisioning a row of mighty heroes coming forth
to reclaim The World from the monsters of life!
the indecisions of your honor (laughs the blue demeanor
of Man's utter lack, indulgently, inclemently he laughs)
blue, in possession of our Destiny's pen
scribbling over us its syllables of fascination
believing, really, that with such empty stuffs
(as possessing it) lives
finally: some lasting, unimpeachable merit
or, his share of the truth! Blue, pen but performs
ink's implicit imperatives: fixed to a fixity
Doom's unpardonable Past:
Someone, somebody other than (I'll bet)
still must play Th'Playwright.
And yet divulging The Results too early
or going through (whatever other motion it takes
to lift the unbearable) restrictions upon Man
of Time's: the poets hold forth their tantrums of Rhyme
subduing the heavy traffics which ever so subtly
graft upon Man: the (cells) gravel
of (the Road that's chasing him away
along) th'antipodal Horizon so far,
far away, until the cageless Beast finds himself
prison-blues singing himself across the bars down his heart
strings melancholy: onwards the blue guitar
Blue, Time holds the awesome
presence of its outraging Creation
over the restrictless (Wings
of the singing) Imagination
getting them all tangled up in too-fangled attitudes
falling like Icarus from the presumption(s)
of some Infinite (proposed only) Man
stretching so high as to reach with some truth perhaps
or one not at his disposal, blue:
The Garbage, really, but a bag of wind
falling at last for some greater truth,
maybe, "Those who are condemned to relieve it
are remembering the past,"
etc. ... his poetry
but the prose of slack in the string (running around his neck)
*
*
*
The Ultimate Hope turns brittle at the cold
in our insane (tries to keep the string waxed) blue
to our Best touch--because we fear The Ugly more
than even our greatest pains
--Because we always travel
from one to another pain... by pains it is
we travel The Darkness to The Numb
--perhaps: Who knows... Who has got beyond that? [sic]
* * *
Death crumbling the manifest Salvation
before our eyes: Volumes of Balance
filling the family albums (of history)
with the familiar (faces) partaking
endlessly) of the social crimes--unthinkable, blue
Our children's children--too innocently will ask
The Immature Generation (kicking viciously to death
the kind little old lady)
... if that's not a Crime:
"Everything's relative," is the reply:
"We are all Man."
while The Conservatives go on & on about how
All well-intentioned people are misguided,
Banks!... The Government!...
God! helps those who help themselves
& wot-not ... They say, unrecognizable in their varied Guises:
"Crime is acceptable if necessary," & etc
Gamble, God, Gamble!
Blue Time (in its several disguises)
doth proclaim: "There is no such a thing as Chance,"
and you well know it
--You who can not only hear
but are also singing the blue Centuries of Man
famous & infamous (blue, here, blue)
singing their Hallelujahs of stupendous Stupor.