O Calendar of the Century,
red-letter the Republic’s birth!
O Hallelujah,
oh, let no Miserere
venom the spinal cord of Afric earth!
Selah!
“Ecce homo!”
the blind men rant
before the Capitol,
between the Whale and Elephant,
where no longer stands Diogenes’ hearse
readied for the ebony mendicant,
nor weeping widow Europe with her hands
making the multitudinous seas incarnadine,
or earth’s massebóth worse:
omega hounds
lap up the alpha laugh and du-haut-en-bas curse.
Selah!
O Africa, Mother of Science …
lachen mit yastchekes…
what dread hand,
to make tripartite one august event,
sundered Gondwanaland?
What dread grasp crushed your biceps and
back upon the rack
chaos of chance and change
fouled in Stygian isolation?
What dread elboga shoved your soul
into the tribulum of retardation?
A people dies to the world and dies:
Rome casketed herself in a day; yet
fool latins, alumni of one school,
say Phew …
Lest we forget! Lest we forget! …
to dusky peers of Roman, Greek, and Jew.
Selah!
Elders of Agå’s House, keening
at the Eagles’ feast, cringing
before the Red Slayer, shrinking
from the blood on Hubris’ pall
hitherto
against the Wailing Wall
the blind men cried:
All cultures crawl
walk hard
fall,
flout
under classes under
Lout,
enmesh in ethos, in masôreth, the poet’s flesh,
intone the Mass of the class as the requiem of the mass,
serve tribal idols till the crack of will,
castle divorcee Art in a blue-blood moat,
read the flesh of grass
into bulls and bears,
let Brahmin pens kill
Everyman the Goat,
write Culture’s epitaph in Notes upstairs.
O Cordon Sanitaire,
thy brain’s tapeworm, extract, thy eyeball’s mote!
Selah!
Between pavilions
small and great
sentineled from capital to stylobate
by crossbow, flintlock, cannon, or atom bomb,
… and none went in and none went out …
hitherto the State,
stout
from slave, feudal, bourgeois, or soviet grout,
has hung its curtain-scrim, foulard, pongee,
silk, lace, or iron-helled in by fears
of the black beast, not-to-be:
behind the curtain, aeon after aeon,
he who doubts the White Book’s colophon
is Truth’s, if not Laodicean, wears
the T of doomed Laocoön.
Before hammer and sickle or swastika, two
worlds existed: the Many, the Few.
They sat at Delos’, at Vienna’s, at Yalta’s, ado:
Macbeth as host
to Banquo’s ghost.
Selah!
Like some gray ghoul from Alcatraz,
old Profit, the bald rake paseq, wipes the bar,
polishes the goblet vanity,
leers at the tigress Avarice
as
she harlots roués from afar:
ancestral voices prophesying war,
ists potted and pitted by a feast,
Red Ruin’s skeleton horsemen, four abreast
… galloping …
Marx, the exalter, would not know his East
… galloping …
nor Christ, the Leveler, His West.
Selah!
O Age of Tartuffe …
a lighthouse with no light atop …
O Age, pesiq, O Age, .
kinks internal and global stinks
dog dunce and dog
: and sage.
O Peoples of the Brinks,
come with the hawk’s resolve,
the skeptic’s optic nerve, the prophet’s tele verve,
and Oedipus’ guess, to solve
the riddle of
the Red Enigma and the White Sphinx.
Selah!
O East, o West,
pacts, disemboweled, crawl off to die;
White Books, fiers instants promis d la faux,
choke on mulligan truth and lie;
the knife of Rousseau hacks the anatomy
of the fowl necessity;
dead eyes accuse red Desfourneau
whose sit-down strike gives rulers vertigo;
the case Caesarean, Lethean brew
nor instruments obstetrical at hand,
the midwife of the old disenwombs the new;
Esperanto trips the heels of Greek;
the pearl too rich for swine
the anonymous seek.
Selah!
The Höhere of Gaea’s children
is beyond the dérèglement de tous les sens, is beyond
gold fished from cesspools, the galerie des rois,
the seeking of cows, Apartheid, Sisyphus’ despond,
the Ilande intire of itselfe with die Schweine in mud,
the potter’s wheel that stocks the potter’s field,
Kchesinskaja’s balcony with epitaphs in blood,
deeds hostile all, O Caton, to hostile eyes,
the breaking of foreheads against the walls,
gazing at navels, thinking with thighs
The Höhere of God’s stepchildren
is beyond the sabotaged world, is beyond
das Diktat der Menschenverachtung,
the pelican’s breast rent red to feed the young,
the Revue des morts, time’s wings cut to the stumps,
the skulls trepanned to hold ideas plucked from dung,
Dives’ crumbs in the church of the unchurched,
absurd life shaking its ass’s ears among
the colors of vowels and Harrar blacks
with Nessus shirts from Europe on their backs
The Höhere of X’s children
is beyond Heralds’ College, the filets ďArachné, is beyond
the Mal éternel, the Bells of Ys,
the oasis ď horreur dans un désert d’ennui,
the Orizaba with its Bridge of Sighs,
Yofan’s studio and Shkola Nenavisti,
the otototoi-in Crimson Tapestries-of the hoi polloi,
rubato defeats
in the Sausage Makers’ bout
the fool himself himself finds out
and in the cosmos of his chaos
repeats.
Selah!
The Höhere of one’s pores En Masse …
Christians, Jews, ta ethne …
makes as apishly
brazen as the brag and brabble of brass
the flea’s fiddling
on the popinjay,
the pollack’s pout
in the net’s hurray,
the jerboa’s feat
in the fawn and the flout
of
Quai d’Orsay
White House,
Kremlin,
Downing Street.
Esperanto trips the heels of Greek:
things-as-they-are-for-us
speak!
O East, o West,
on tenotomy bent,
Chang’s tissue is
Eng’s ligament!
Selah!
Between Yesterday’s wars
now hot now cold
the agony of Man
dripping dripping dripping
from the Cross of Gold
dripping
drew jet vampires
of the Skull;
between Yesterday’s
golden goblet and truckling trull
and the ires
of rivers red with the reflexes of fires,
the ferris wheel
of race, of caste, of class
dumped and alped cadavers till the ground
fogged the Pleiades with Gila rot: Today the mass,
the Beast with a Maginot Line in its Brain,
the Gravediggers’ men of base alloy,
the canaglia-Goriil—die Untertanen,
the hoi barbaroi,
Il Duce’s Whore, Vardaman’s Hound,
the vsechelovek, the People, Yes,
the hoi polloi
ride the merry-go-round!
Selah!
Leave a Reply