St. Agnes Eve

Music yearned like a god in pain through every earbud of every handheld device on the train, drilling into bone sockets like the train through sheer granite (Manhattan schist). Flooding the passenger compartment from the wheels below, God’s yearning, forged steel cacophony. A station approaches: trumpeting wheels snarl and chide. Above, at street level, the pulsating throb of the global economy, the universal machine, God’s pain mechanized, earth-shattering. The death-agony of a God enslaved. Universal power source for all our devices: the tortured God. The bleeding finger, the broken lute string. Orpheus dismembered. God’s body parts littering the landscape in the form of silos, wind turbines, office complexes, shopping malls and sewage treatment plants. And when we have carved the last edible morsel from God’s ribs?

Manhattan—one of the islands which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

The thought makes purple riot in my heart.

Cowardice runs faster than death (Socrates). Gallop on, splintered music. Behold, our immortality. (Darkness at the end of the tunnel.)

5/27/2014

Under the Stars

"Onto the asphalt, rainy-bright, festive shopsigns plastered parti-colored jester patches. Festive jester plasters. For cudgeled clowns. The sidewalks were skinned with iridescent snake.”      
                                                                                                          Night On the Town, 1982


                               Standing under a vomit of stars I wounded
                               The air with my breathing and drank in the stench of carnage—
                               Clear as the liquorous aether distilled by evening—
                               Wafting from battles past in the light of my anguish
                               Tempered with murderous sadness drowned in the knowledge
                               That even the circus of cruelty and severed finger
                               And innocence clothed in a raincoat of pelting missiles,
                               Excrement, filth and flints is a garment in season
                               Now that the only motley is clown-colored cheap suits
                               Made and imported from China for corporate flunkies.
                               Plastered under a gauntlet of stars I saw this.

                               5/15/2014

Intractable Issues

Gods like income disparity, climate change, wage servitude, corporate slavery, overpopulation, degradation and destruction of the earth come to dominate and control every aspect of our lives because—having become disillusioned with gods (from Old Nobodaddy to the Olympian rogue’s gallery)—we thought mortals could do without gods and, quaintly, decided not to “believe” in them anymore. We call these new gods “intractable issues.”

Timid atheists, we have assigned the “solution” of these global “problems” to a legendary future, mirror image of a past Golden Age. Meanwhile the new gods—rogues and rascals like their parents—continue to thwart our plans for world domination.

                                         The bat that flits at close of eve
                                         Is from the brain that won't believe.
                                                                    (Auguries of Innocence)