Always the fear of being followed
Follows the fear of being …
Between two rivers and asides of sleep,
One island’s perishing between two shores
Marks for the citizen his neural friend,
Friend Death; bent diver backward falls
Through twigs and spirals of the branchy mind
But there, cerulean no waterfalls.
Following, following the stony tower,
O pigeon splattered into permanence,
Your heart is eaten in the sunken plaza
Where only the fountain hopes for silence
And falls forever in the anxious air
Following itself downward to nowhere.
Gargantuan the shadowed situation
Of night-stick Holbeins and the fresco scream;
Whose fear of fear is being loved,
Is desperate to conceal his fear, his smile
Skids cheapness at the bar, his hands
Are secrets in disguising clothes.
He can remember the day his father,
Ambiguously sane, was to discover
His passionate error in the fifth borough;
Had crossed the ferry to a single friend,
Claims as the first that only twist,
Says to the expert, “Tell me the worst.”
He knows the tireless but lyric gift
Of unquenchable pursuers; the false linger
Before the window, or the crooked stance;
He thinks something is wrong with their eyes,
With their disease and his desire, and knows
What feasts itself and dies of hunger.
Always the fear of being followed
Follows the fear of being …
O self against Satan, you who bloody
Conscience with an afterthought, be strict;
Deny the precinct of enchanting self,
Choose that area most difficult, and know
Something beside the self as hovel
Can only end the search for approval.
The double phoenix plays the awful game,
The sin of difference and the fear of name,
Wrestles with bridges, pays the final toll;
But still the bent diver hovers in the pool,
(Your public pleasure for your private vice),
His favorite image rides the whirl.
Until the end of all displeasure comes,
The permanent anxiety, the triple drums,
What can we ask for once again
But a world undamned by a double shame;
For love is desperately in arrears,
Nuns and detectives travel in pairs.
By Death’s investment of this stony dust,
The end in sight is not the fountain’s pity:
Let the chilled strollers on the corrupt lawn
Deny the insolence of favored blood,
Let someone somewhere say a word of good:
The world moves; why doesn’t it move forward?
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