Is anyone else disappointed that “Palindrome” is not a palindrome?
Today a Christian told me: “You know that voice in your head telling you what you should and shouldn’t do? That’s god speaking to you.”
Really? GOD told me to blow that line of crank off that biker chick’s ass?…
Been thinking about Hart Crane of late.
http://www.learner.org/vod/vod_window.html?pid=591
A Jest from the Speechless Caravan
(To the man who sold me the Brooklyn Bridge)
“Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.”
—Heart Crane
Raucous prophet of piston and steam,
Of lusty, symphonic gear and wheel;
Steeping the night in jackhammer dreams,
Why not the Bifrost road to Brooklyn?
Did water alone remain to love?
Did gravity weigh ostentatious?
Sad pilgrim of circular passage,
Seduced to the water nymph’s lethal
Kiss, honored laurite of the deep;
All is upon transformation’s edge.
Flesh surrenders to endurance but
What purpose is midwived in the deed?
What could be so congenial as
A bridge builder sipping at coffee
On the banks of an unspanned river?
The stones still grow, if tamed to the leash,
Trained to stark, right-angle discipline
And bent to the purpose of commerce.
Rivet and girder are bodied at
Least, things that speak to the nerves of skin;
Even the haunting cold is something.
I’ve never known a world not metal,
The elder gods of wood and leaf, all
Of them banished before my tenure.
Bard of apocalypse, bound in iron;
Our weary engine, it seizes and
Starts—seizes and starts—seizes and starts.
* * *
Three Poems About Language
A Glouse for the Knights of the Savage Tongue
Their tongue’s the sharp blade seeking the softness
Between song and speech’s narrow rib gap:
A wispy spring rain and its cool finesse,
The raging storm’s merciless thunder clap.
Their industry flows from the Saxon axe,
Its birthright of dexterous strength and skill.
Through the tumultuous beauty it hacks
And steadily rolls like the watermill.
Their goals they’ll as likely cut as caress,
Their tongue’s the sharp blade seeking the softness.
Nuance and emphasis endlessly war,
Irony seeks to slip gravity’s grasp;
A stranger’s shadow seen under the door
And the gentle grass, wherein lies the asp.
All seek the unsayable to entrap
Between song and speech’s narrow rib gap.
There are legion pretenders to the art,
Those who would extol mediocrity;
Those who would select their words with a dart
And who’s only rule is obscurity.
A hammer is ill-fitted to express
A wispy spring rain and its cool finesse.
They are blacksmiths, shipwrights, cutters of stone;
At once ambassador and inciter.
It is they who rebel, they who enthrone:
Warrior set apart from rough fighter.
Each, in their way, in their words seek to map
The raging storm’s merciless thunder clap.
* * *
English
English is the bastard child
Of a drunken,
Over the hill German boxer
And
A used-up, overbearing
French whore.
* * *
Speak
Words, fixtures, windows.
Little white lies
And rotting corpses.
Broken picture tubes,
Abandoned temples.
Crude stone hammers employed
In the crafting
Of delicate shadows.
There is no truth in advertising;
We murder what we name.
* * *
What has become of us?
We, whose rough hands formed
All things of industry.
We who brought down the beast
And made of him a meal.
We who clothed and fed the body,
Who nurtured the growing
Things on our blood.
We who mined, smelted and
Forged the very iron that binds us.
Whose blood and sweat
Keeps them strong;
Smug, bold, and imperial.
Much of the world goes unseen,
Unnoticed like the
Tangled floor of a forest,
Untouched by the buried imagination,
Overlooked in the
Restless search for ore.
Memory haunted beings;
Objects impregnated
With the vibrations of history
Like a canvass overcoat with wax
To resist
The worst of the wind and rain.
Constantly negotiating
The ideological backwaters
Of was and is,
Ignoring
The rough and unseemly rocks
That agitate the hulls
Of well-bred schooners.
Still, I remain unconcerned
Of over-documented
Nows that are no more.
I dwell here,
In the impoverished razor instant
Of food, shoes, and walls.
Listen closely, can you hear it?
Lay your ear to the ground,
Sleep-like in the waking world
Where it might dream
Itself into lucid consciousness.
Let the deep ear ring
With its soft percussions.
The distant, muted chants
Of the shadowed mind,
The timeless creakings of
Roots as they drink
Fresh rain and ancient blood.
Feel the vibrations
Of long-dead tongues
That reached for things
No words could say.
Voices come and gone,
Hardly discernable
Through their planks of pine
And six deep feet
Of untaxable real estate.
Low bass rumblings too distant
And drone even for
The winged ears of elephants
Who clutch at
Old bone and ivory; remembering.
Hear the idle but knowing
Dinner party chatter
Of aristocratic barrow worms.
Listen closely, do you hear it?
* * *
I Was Told there Would be Cake: An argument for violence in the current class war.
There are those, back in the civilized world, who would counsel patience to the poor. But let me ask you, what have the poor kind shown; for century, after century; age, upon age? They would have us believe that violence can solve nothing--their timid, sneering lips oozing with noxious platitudes about violence being ‘the last resort of limited minds…’ Let me assure you (as someone who has done it professionally) violence is the second or third option of someone who can stomp on you and knows it.
Those who own everything, everyone, do so through violence and the threat of it. To lecture a whipped man on etiquette is rude to my thinking. To council pacifism to the oppressed is delusional at best, but likely far less benign in objective. Under no threat, they risk nothing. What is justice to them but vaporous abstraction? Hypocrites, who call one man degenerate for crimping bread to feed his family, then praise another for murdering nations in the name of profit, dismissing the carnage of their greed as the cost of progress.
Floating in smug comfort high above the sound of screams, the stench of death, the blood we drown in. The poor and cast-off can starve and die by the untold; they shrug it off with glib banality. If one of theirs falls of course, the whole of Mother Night needs to stop and bear witness. Tribute owed our self-appointed masters.
Upright and righteous folk might urge us to dialogue, but what would they have us say? Should we beg for what is ours? Should we beg for the pity of men with none? They would have us hold hands and sing songs of a better day, but hope without cause is idiocy. There is no opiate so malignant to the spirit. Are you not weary of pedantic, effete, scum telling you they ‘feel your pain’? What do they know of pain, or hunger? When have they been beaten like dogs, or watched their children murdered? Cut-down by treacherous pigs who whore themselves to the rich, assuring their property and privilege in exchange for the right to bully and butcher with impunity. When have they been cast into the gutter, left to wither and die? Who are they to appeal for patience, to talk of peace?
No more. The time for patience has ended. The hour of vengeance has struck. Our enemy’s greatest vice, their most repugnant crime, is the earnest belief they share in their own native supremacy, spoken aloud or no. They take all you labor for and say it is theirs by birthright. They throw you scraps to fight and spill your brother’s blood for, expecting gratitude in the bargain. All resentment they dismiss as envy, the petty jealousies of little people. Any question of their moral clarity, their innate imperative: treasonous, blasphemous, wretched in contempt. They are utterly sincere in the belief that they are owed obedience, that they are your natural superiors; but they are mistaken.
A society, like a forest, requires from time to time the purging catharsis of fire to endure. We are the burning, lashing tongues of that flame. We will teach them to distinguish abhorrence from jealousy; the appalled from the envious; the deadly from the meek.