Beware the swag on the tree that stands in the war-lightning,
Hung with a child’s ideas of Christmastime, more colorful than
The glow of desire running swiftly as splintering in a glacier
Up the veins, the swag grows casting its fury upon the rippling
Muscles of the heart, and greed burns its sulphur beacons from
All the straw-hat attics, the traders are traitors tonight.
Beware these wares, for see the lives warring against facades,
The ancient battle is on, and mind runs up all the bastions
Of matter, hunting for the roots of things, the seared wrist
Gloves the piston, the eyes pelt the fortifications, the heart
Spills and paints the pavements out, the unsubtle fingers
Pluck at the humming telephones, mad musicians tuning up.
The war-lightning plays its northern lights to all our music
And saintly roses dripping blood fall from heaven, their petals
Moist with ease, their perfumes emanating from such sweats,
Sentries in uniforms stand like smarting decorations in windows,
The huge facts that ballooned like landscapes collapse to figures,
The rich woman buttons her purse and writes a poem on the war.
But the bill of rights fast becomes the writing on the wall,
And ideas come naked in colored cellophane tightly wrapped, more
Extravagantly tied down than the cigarettes and the festive
Candies of peacetime, now we are betraying Thomas to his own
Past, revisions are wholesale, and everywhere you hear and see
The desolate evidence crying, “Life is the price of property!”
Our sentiments grow sleazy against the bright music on the radio,
The martyrs at the stakes of unorganized luck are writhing,
Men fall down the hourglass, every moment is displaying its flag,
Every habit is bombarded, and art like a stricken liner stops,
Buries in the Pacific past its ostrich head, in waters of gas,
As the horizon curls its sinister whips around the hope at sea.
And in this bleeding light the mechanized furnitures leap their
Bolts at the mind, the deposit boxes in the banks are flooded with
Visitors’ day, for the treacherous attack on the harbor of pearls
Hung the great jewel of peace beyond reach, its spangles of music
Frame the great breach of collusions, the panic runs deeply in
The hidden arteries, and all the big little seclusions are over.
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