Canto 1
Language collapse, 2003
But it's happened before, countless times
From one annihilation to the next
Still there are actions to do, to make
There's kill & torture & rape
As she wriggles her slim waist
In vain to escape control.
I press
Eat & swallow kidney stones
The result, a punctured bladder.
Look away, look away: gasoline
Burns, computers whirr
And electricity turns.
The most beautiful world order is a heap of dust
said Heraclitus, kallistos kosmos, dick cheyney
Know it all egghead turned dangerous
And harmful to the so-called Republic
With service to capital the main game
Logos grows on its own
Plouton the god of death and wealth
Collects his deposits like the world bank.
Its capital structure of fraudulent accounting
A confidence game of appearances
Videt 2008
Works its dance of life and death,
The laws, the aroma around the cafes
Of Europe and America.
War the master of gods and slaves
The impotent rage of Achilles
Who longed to be nobody
Toils the dirt of the land on an unknown farm.
But the king, the regis men came to take
Its prerogative and your money’s no good
Rich prince in the end
While weird perverts in a billion dollar
Holding company--bankers--calculate the last penny
And its potential for increase
If they don’t want to fuck you in the ass,
Lassie, they’ll spend the night
Count up their money
2.
All the nice Americans enjoy a good life
on a cool spring afternoon, kids out of school,
moms still in boots and skirts and bikes,
strollers, bare skinny legs, dads and boys
and meanwhile tax debts are blown
to smithereens elsewhere for purposes
best left formulated in slogans like freedom,
democracy, liberation. So one entertains
cosmological questions as if it were possible
to form any intimation of any value
better than the great moral and political
philosophers of our time,
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, boys
schooled in the paranoid vision of Henry
Kissinger and Leo Strauss
Preen like stuffed poppies and peacocks
with their armour of power, Arnheim
success, imbeddedness, perverts
with smiling faces useless to all
but the priests of capital. Fools
Are serious men with serious ideas
formed and shaped by
delusions of grandeur and fear.
In New York City, village cops grimace
and walk the streets; residents prefer small dogs,
people just want to live in pleasure,
unnoticed except in the way
they make consumer choices.
False optimists kill the world,
in the global security state,
make a cowardly new world,
stepford wives in fairfield county connecticut.
Petronius Arbiter's perception of corruption,
the visible sheen of power,
completely unquestioned and uncontested
Imperial bureaucracy
Pleasures of the moment
Her face is money in a crooked compact mirror
held in the manicured fingers
of a borderline desperate girl
as she checks her makeup,
8:30am.
3.
David and Paul—s&m best buddies
Dream of command and control
Force majeure,
The most dangerous game,
War, and the hunting of men
The constant battle score
Of winning & not winning
Humiliation and the pleasure
as someone labors beneath me
As parent to child
Discipline to indulgence
The secret lives of policemen,
In plainclothes, they only feel
comfortable with each other,
not even their families,
separate from and circumspect of the public.
Auctoritas granted by the symbol of the uniform.
Spring foreshadows the penultimate future
Sunlight streams at higher and higher an angle
But the winter men do not disappear,
They do not fade away
But continue to poke out their long
Bony limbs to harvest the lambs.
Grandfathers, the rule of the elders,
Stultify the future.
Habet and musica splenum
Look out on saltwater
Where oceans meet rivers
And human beings build cities
Of such splendor and size
Yet such little men live their lives
And rule their wives
And govern their cities
Money lenders
Like whore master pimps
Incomparable to dog breeders
And the hum and roar and drum
Of motor and engine whisper of oil
And energy and centuries, no
Millenia of naval engineering
And vigils of tidal waterways
From here to the Red Sea
And Mesopotamia. So you work and you
Slave confused and scattered
Your energy and juices flow
For the crumbs and cakes
And kidneys that your city
And its masters come to dribble like spittle
Of a language long dead and forgotten
By all but a few stultified scholars, heat
Their frail bodies smoking stoves
In wooden rooms 'cross the wide
Oceans and the phrases flutter by
Like particles of dust in gray and smoke
And fog and there's someone’s attempt
Someone’s effort to set a foundation
And point it to the sky and touch
It perhaps or at least indicate God
As if that mattered
But he’s too mysterious
Remote and closed and nonexistent
To make any difference to your
Poor petty plight, too removed
From your lust and desire and anger
Wrath and rage and military might.
No, there isn’t a god for you or for you
Or for you to find consolation,
And meaning and purpose.
A feeling of justice or mere justification,
An opinion you hold dear.
The mindless glories
Erupt, disrupt reveries of rapture
Bankrupt bankers impoverish nations
And heap up feces into piles of majesty
Erecting a new world order, kallistos kosmos,
So beautiful its dazzle blinds our eyes
4.
If language is an ocean,
Who are the people I see
On the streets? In war
Success breeds contempt
The more to protect
The more pressing the cage.
The champions of the field
Field deep resonant voices
Resound like heralds trumpets
Messages come from puppets flicked
By madmen, perverts, paranoid religion
Seekers—inhuman, man, woman and child
Fear not they lack god and power but
Their own bodies and estates
Of acreage so numerous they will never have it all
Even now the locals trespass, play
Dangerous games of hunting and humiliation.
Who feels the need to sequester
Himself on 70,000 acres, a millionaire’s
House sitting in the middle of it, on a rocky hill,
Where his daughter’s a dyke and his wife his high school
Sweetheart—recruit, command and control
None of them know to where they are heading.
War, the hunting of men, corralling them like wild horses
Then killing them or blowing them up. But killing is madness for them, not an art or a skill, but a mass production process, a game of trigger fingers and false patriotism of old men who’ve reached for what they’ve grasped and whose women have stood by them and whose children hate them and love them and imbibe the air of nationalism. The fatherland, the motherland, the homeland the dominance and subjugation—who will eat my dust—I ask Jesus and Abraham as if some old book held the answers that are held in no other book, the dirty words of translated Latin and Hebrew and who knows what and all the while the blood continues to gush, like a journalist’s mouth who fills up and chokes then swallows down the draught his dream to serve the masters of nothing.
Stupid blonde cunts leave their cum splotched all around the place, on the couches, the sheets, the towels, feeling entitled to have others wipe up their fertility, safe and secure that the powerful will love them and if they can pay to fuck them, ok, or strip for money or maybe get married to a successful banker or an artist or rock star, yet that’s now a joke, as only egghead and his texas fag boys get the dime now to fuck the cow cunts of their loud mouthed but cowed christian wives.
Glory’s whores accept better pay like the boys and the men who come to texas and New York from mexico to work and send federal reserve notes back home thinking as we all do we’re storing value when where just lending and extending credit, belief, faith, to the rich old eggheads who sit atop midasian piles of croesus’ wealth, gold and jewels and paper promises—whatever it is—the name of God being papered over and again proving that he does not exist except as a blank slate that anal man splatters with his twisted desires and fears and some hoarse rabbinical cry as if time didn’t exist and babies were born out of nothing and gods in our imaginations didn’t cackle and groan and flatulate seeking nothing but eternal festivities ready to eat man on a stick or spear like shit.
The mindless glories: dick ch---- fucking his wife lynn up the ass but then he gets so excited he’s having a vision of his future as one of the numbskulls brought in as a slave to the power elite of nothing, the magical realm of mammon by which you collect wealth like it’s shit and wield the levers of power in paranoid secret places all the while cry to jesus on Sunday and probably really pray, hope and pray that you’re right after all, morally, you’re justified, deserving of the storehouse of goods you so cluck for and he sticks it up her cunt from behind and keeps having the vision and on that night conceives his offspring furthering the animal existence of dick cheney.
Hatred for the mindless glories excites the poet, but does not relieve the suffering, why should it, no sympathetic leanings, human pathos. The mindless glories, victory of vanity and the success that answers all arguments and the animal happiness specific to humans sets in. War, the tipping point, the moment of uncertainty, wherein the unexpected reveals itself, as in any event, the movement goes on, you don’t always trip and fall. So the bastards win, chalk one up for the fasces, whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys strictly a matter of us or them. The fascist assholes suck everything into themselves and the mindless glories unroll.
Magic power—youthful spring
April the cruelest, the most cruel
Black night rich fecund as death
And fertilizer, manure the
Earth, the fields, to the woods
Where the blue quail nest.
Civilized man, educate your city
But I won’t be surprised
When you launch upon the sea
To destroy yourself
In comedy. Lacking knowledge,
Acting kings, ignoring
Perception—simple—instead
Feeding the flowers of opinion
Flourish and bloom
In the city of man’s
Make
poetry
According to laws
Divined by nature and ideas
But each miscalculation
Failed understanding,
Ignored perception leads
The city further astray
Until lost in the woods
Mired in some dark
Unknown night or at sea,
In mountainous wood
In the desert bleak
We stumble and grope rely
On intelligence, resource
And organization and prevail
We shall but another
Part inside collapses
Emptiness instills itself,
Watch yourself,
In yet another compartment.
Move it, Dick, the numbers, man, the numbers. They must pile up. The numbers aren’t adding up! What do you think this is, a math problem with a gold star for the right answer? It’s a business. The only right answer is more, more results, the bottom line. Do it.
The Mindless Glories
Canto 2
Language becomes disposable
The slight murmur whirrs through a room,
a whisper, a whistling shuttle clicks,
vibrates, hums, the beats per second
varying pitch and tone, like a radio
you can barely hear
unless you tune your ear to its bandwith,
a buzz just audible,
bagpipes in the distant mountain pass.
schoolchildren two blocks away,
shout at the top of their lungs,
becomes the chatter of socialites in the next room,
but the sound twirls through the atmosphere
enters your ear canal, strikes the tympanum
and the sound registers in your mind once, twice. . . .
Your eyes flicker, come alive in a spark
from a dull glaze, deadened, blinded, the worn-out state
of having seen enough, the mind numb from processing it,
organizing it, the tragedy, the comedy, the philosophy,
the sarcasm, cynicism, irony, surprise, logical articulation,
sonorous nonsequiturs, and the bombs let loose over cities
and the hypocrisies of the homeland residents
who like to think that the good is simple and true like them.
When I worked for the rich, they handed me money.
The fire burns up, leaves a crisp corpse,
scattered by the breeze as the sun heats the air,
pushes it eastward to the sea
evaporates and condenses moisture,
the ocean stretches, reaches, lies lovingly there
and the wind blows cooler, drier over the plains.
There’s a fetid swamp to the west,
a cursed land of riches and uncounted wealth,
carpeted by black oil extract,
pebbled over for personal transportation,
and on the seaboard, in a drained wetland,
sit the façade of buildings of accumulated capital,
a couple of handfuls of generation of fresh starts, ingenuity,
can-do mercantile exploitation of opportunities and resources,
land, forest, pasture, livestock, men, slaves
men, natives, men, savages, the women either whores
or high-priced whores from back East
and religious zealots to make the common fate that much the worse.
Meanwhile, three hundred years later,
language has become disposable,
like everything man and woman make,
the best thing generated from sperm and egg
what logos spills forth from the jaws of children
grown wild while the first class customers cross legs
not in knitted, but white sweat socks, sneakers, sweatpants,
soberly scan news of corporate America
in the wall street journal while baby boomer hippies clutch surfboards
and scowl at the immigrants think
that nature and nurture have gone wrong
somehow and only a god can save us now
and death is not such a bad thing
but certainly not a good thing
and he is so lonely and of course
there is nothing good enough to write
home about, while his father sits blind,
terrified, unable to walk or hear as the bombs drop
and the people go out for a walk on concrete
cluttered with garbage and the wrecked detritus of the global marketplace.
Language becomes disposable, everything is made to be consumed,
then piled in a heap, like newspapers, and letters to shareholders
and press releases and official statements, reports,
documents warehoused in libraries,
in file cabinets, then filed in Macintosh or Dell servers,
like tube high fidelity receivers
sit one to another in rows of thousands,
electricity dances through integrated circuits,
flips off and on, pulses a million times a moment
and then racing through fiber optic cable from here to Canada
Beijing then Calcutta, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London and back,
forget about Africa where evolutionary biologists think we all came from
who cares about that when all we can think of is….
and our mother? To slip the dagger in the sheath once more,
an old CEO warrior in his sixties and the twenty-nine year old
gold digger, class of ‘69, wants what? To marry him?
Just stand around and look good and love him
for what he can do for you and you for him?
Moral virtue, yes, that tired-out bitch,
well just listen to the Marquis de Sade,
what he has to say about that old maid,
clucking away and frittering like an ice pick
twirls around on its tip, slashes through the ice,
waits for the champagne to cool,
Rupert Murdoch gets a blowjob one more time,
and the money is secured like a shot of freezer cold vodka
and a young junior leaguer, a comer, brags to her friend
and the older ladies about a park
restoration project, digging up buckets of dirt
wheel barrows in wood chips,
stands around, tall and lanky
wonders what they’re doing this for,
I don’t even live in this neighborhood,
but my husband works at the bank.
The classic struggle in America,
New York City,
we’re too entranced and enthralled to the thought of sex
money, drugs, making it,
securing the conveniences of life and oh yes
the children our children our future,
the jungle gym, the jungle of the american ideology,
you hope, brother, and sister, that it holds up
at least till you’re dead and gone.
Class struggle on the fat of the land
or the flat of your ass,
Dead and gone and left,
who’s left around here to walk these hard streets—
oh the empty country, let’s pave it over
and get old Walton in here, drive, baby drive,
burn the gasoline, pollute the river, the fish,
who cares, the trout, they’re dead already,
except a few tucked away here or there,
but oh I guess it’s not that bad around here
and there the state stocks the streams every spring,
oh yes, the boys and old faggot hillbillies cruising
in beaten up old pick-up trucks, bodies long gone
to decades of eating at MacDonalds and working,
working, no one has a job that pays much of a cent,
just hope the property boom keeps resounding
I hear this is the Hamptons of the Catskills.
Media softened brains, fatted with information,
and the saws of old wisdom just don’t seem to have any point or edge,
so they don’t pierce or cut. What’s needed are explosives,
a cutting edge is useless now, except for close-in fighting
of course. A small pistol, a canon.
But now, the big guns are needed,
bombs dropped from planes,
money dropped from helicopters.
Meanwhile, at the mall, teens ride elevators, reading Musil,
and Esquire, but wait, Esquire sucks now,
there’s only the new jork times to read now,
liberals across the country scouring it for interpretations,
listening to NPR for what to do, what to think,
while drink coffee and wait on the weekend,
secretly suspect and, later, around the barbecue,
admit there’s nothing they can do
but hope to keep paying the mortgage.
