Poetry

There Is No Life or Death

There is no Life or Death,
Only activity
And in the absolute
Is no declivity.
There is no Love or Lust
Only propensity
Who would possess
Is a nonentity.
There is no First or Last
Only equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.
There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity.

Parturition

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without.
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension

I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait-painter
Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment
Sings
“All the girls are tid’ly did’ly
All the girls are nice
Whether they wear their hair in curls
Or⁠—”
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception Brute
Why?
The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.
He is running up-stairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes.
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night-hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation

Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?

A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life
Life
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted maternity
Against my thigh
Touch of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was⁠—is⁠—ever⁠—shall⁠—be
Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life⁠—stir
I am that cat

Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue-bottles
—Epicurean⁠—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding

The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware

Italian Pictures

Three Moments in Paris

Sketch of a Man on a Platform

Man of absolute physical equilibrium
You stand so straight on your legs
Every plank or clod you plant your feet on
Becomes roots for those limbs

Among the men you accrete to yourself
You are more heavy
And more light
Force being most equitably disposed
Is easiest to lift from the ground
So at the same time
Your movements
Unassailable
Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet
The essence of a Mademoiselle Genée
Winks in the to-and-fro of your cuff-links

Your projectile nose
Has meddled in the more serious business
Of the battle-field
With the same incautious aloofness
Of intense occupation
That it snuffles the trail of the female
And the comfortable
Passing odors of love

Your genius
So much less in your brain

Than in your body
Reinforcing the hitherto negligible
Qualities
Of life
Deals so exclusively with
The vital
That it is equally happy expressing itself
Through the activity of pushing
Things
In the opposite direction
To that which they are lethargically willing to go
As in the amative language
Of the eyes

Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any⁠—or all
Forms of creative idiosyncrasy
While the occasional snap
Of actual production
Stings the face of the public.

Houses hold virgins
The door’s on the chain

“Plumb streets with hearts”
“Bore curtains with eyes”

Virgins without dots1
Stare beyond probability

See the men pass
Their hats are not ours
We take a walk
They are going somewhere
And they may look everywhere
Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out

A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror
Something less to the confessional
The rest to Time
There is so much Time
Everything is full of it
Such a long time

Virgins may whisper
“Transparent nightdresses made all of lace”
Virgins may squeak
“My dear I should faint!”
Flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠…
.⁠ ⁠… “And then the man⁠—”
Wasting our giggles
For we have no dots

We have been taught
Love is a god
White with soft wings
Nobody shouts
Virgins for sale
Yet where are our coins
For buying a purchaser
Love is a god
Marriage expensive
A secret well kept
Makes the noise of the world
Nature’s arms spread wide
Making room for us
Room for all of us
Somebody who was never
a virgin
Has bolted the door
Put curtains at our windows
See the men pass
They are going somewhere

Fleshes like weeds
Sprout in the light
So much flesh in the world
Wanders at will

Some behind curtains
Throbs to the night
Bait to the stars

Spread it with gold
And you carry it home
Against your shirt front
To a shaded light
With the door locked
Against virgins who
Might scratch

To You

The city
Wedged between impulse and unfolding
Bridged
By diurnal splintering
Of egos
Round
The aerial news-kiosk
Where you
Statically
Hob-nob
With a nigger
And a deaf-mute
Of introspection

Plopping finger
In Stephen’s ink
Made you hybrid-negro

A couple of manuscriptural erasures
And here we have your deaf-mute
Beseech him
He will never with-hold so
Completely
As the tattle of tongue-play
Or your incognito

Lit cavities in the face of the city
Open their glassy embrace to receive you
In your mask of unborn ebony
And the silence of your harangue

The tight-rope stretched above commotion
Frays to tow
To the step tentative
fend shadows are yours for the taking
Where the mono-rabble
Plays the one-stringed banjo
On the noise of its ragged heart
Inaudible
In the shattering city
Alien as your aboriginal
In the levelling dirt⁠—

Giovanni Franchi

The threewomen who all walked
In the same dress
And it had falling ferns on it
Skipped parallel
To the progress
Of Giovanni Franchi

Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked
Flickeringly as he flacked them
His wrists explained things
Infectiously by way of his adolescence
His adolescence was all there was of him
Whatever was left was rather awkward
His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees
Descended to the fallacious nobility
Of his first pair of trousers

They were tubular flapped friezily
The colour of coppered mustard
What matter
Were they not the first
No others could ever be the first again
The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen
Began fading as she thought of it
Tea-table problems for insane asylums
Are démodé
Démodé

Allow us to rely on our instincts

The threewomen was composed of three instincts
Each sniffing divergently directed draughts
The first instinct first again may
renascent gods save us from the enigmatic
penetralia of Firstness
Was to be faithful to a man first
The second to be loyal to herself first
She would have to find which self first
The third which might as well have been first
Was to find out how many toes the
philosopher Giovanni Bapini had first

Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born
You imagine what he looked like
Looked it as nearly as he could as the
philosopher looked
His articulations were excellent
Still where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous
Giovanni Franchi was merely pale

His acolytian sincerity
The sensitive down among his freckles
Fell in with the patriotic souls of flags
Red white and green flags filliping piazzas
When the “National Idea” arrived on the Milan Express
He scuttled winsomely
To its distribution from a puffer
For the declaration of War

Continually cutting off an angle from Paszkowski’s
Through plate-glass swingings
To look as busy bodily
As the philosopher’s brain was
As Giovanni Bapini importuned mobs
From monumental gums
To the sparky detritus
From the hurried cigarette
Of his disciple

Whose papa and mama kept a trattoria
Audaciously squatting right opposite the Pitti Palace
The Pitti Palace however stolid could hardly help noticing
Being an aristocrat it went on looking
As plainly piled up as ever
The Pitti Palace has never been known to mention the trattoria
Or mention Giovanni Franchi
Sitting in it
At a book
It could not see from that distance
Giovanni watching the munchers supporting his parents
With an eye
On assuring himself
Of their sufficient impression
By erudition

He was so young
That explains so much
No book ever explained what to be young is
But they look so much more important for that
Giovanni was in continuous exstacy
Induced by the imposing look of them
When Giovanni Bapini spoke of them
He could not tell
How completely more precious
Would be such knowledge
As how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had

Now the threewomen
For pity’s sake
Let us think of her as she to save time
Seeing the minor Giovanni
Sitting at the major Giovanni’s feet
Made sure he must be counting his toes
All to the contrary he was picking the philosopher’s brains
Happy in the security that when he had done
He would still be youthful enough to sort out his own

He listened at the elder’s lips
That taught him of earthquakes and women
Of women⁠⸻⁠⸻⁠⸻
His manners were abominable
He would kill a woman
Quite inconspicuously it is true
And neglect to attend her funeral
I mean the older man
And what he told
Giovanni Franchi
About these pernicious persons
Was so extremely good for him
It entirely spoilt his first love-affair
To such an extent it never came off

We have read of
Trattoria meaning eating house.
Piazzas or squares
The Pitti Palace enormous
And Paszkowski’s for beer
All are in Firenze
Firenze is Florence
Some think it is a woman with flowers in her hair
But no it is a city with stones on the streets

Giovanni Bapini often said
Everybody in Firenze knows me
And everybody did
Excepting⁠—That is she didn’t
She never knew what he was
Or how he was himself
Yet she uniquely was the one
To speculate upon the number of his toes
The days growing longer
Fulfilling her of curiosity

She made a moth’s-net
Of metaphor and miracles
And on the incandescent breath of civilizations
She chased by moon-and-morn light
Philosopher’s toes

As virginal as had he never worn them
Clear of “white marks mean money”
All quicks and cores
They fluttered to her fantasy
Fell into her lap
While she gathered her ferny flounces about them
They inappropriately passed

But Giovanni Franchi was there
He almost winked it at her
That he was there
His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets
The Philosopher had flung to him
And as she tripped by him
She guessed these all
All but the number of those toes

She made diurnal pilgrimage
To the trattoria
To eat
Trout that might have been trained for circuses
If minarets grew in miniature whirlpools
And mayonnaise that helped her to forget
That what is underneath need never matter

She put all minor riddles out of her
Such as
What was the under-cover of Franchi’s book
Telling to the plaid pattern of the table-cloth
Too shy to interrogate
She sent ambassadors
To the disciple
They returned
Oh rats
Quite manifest that Giovanni Franchi
Some semieffigy
Damned by scholiums
Knew no more how many toes⁠—
Than Giovanni Bapini knew himself

Babies in Hospital

At the Door of the House

A thousand women’s eyes
Riveted to the unrealisable
Scatter the wash-stand of the card-teller
Defiled marble of Carrara
On which she spreads
Color-picture maps of destiny
In the corner
Of an inconducive bed-room

“Impassioned
Doubly impassioned
Sad
You see these three cards
But here is the double Victory
And there is an elderly lady
Ill in whom you are concerned
This is the Devil
And these two skeletons
Are mortifications
You are going to make a journey

At evening about love
Here is the Man of the Heart
Turning his shoulders to a lady
Covered with tears about matrimony

At the door of your house
There is a letter about an affair
And a bed and a table
And this ace of spades turned upside-down
‘With respect’
Means that some man
Has well you know
Intentions little honorable

Here you are covered with tears
For a deception
The Man of the Heart
Is in thoughtfulness for a letter
He will make a journey at evening
And really lady
I should say
It will not be long before you see him
For there he is at the door of the house

And look
Here are you
And here is he
In life and thought
At the door of the house”

Muddled among the aniline brightness of the Tauro cards

The wheels with wings
The rows on rows of goblets
Passionate magenta blossoms
Hermits —bring luck⁠—
Moons Prison-fortresses
Cudgels
A man cut in half
Means a deception
And the nude woman
Stands for the world

Those eyes

Of Petronilla Lucia Letizia
Felicita
Filomena Amalia
Orsola Geltrude Caterina Delfina
Zita Bibiana Tarsilla
Eufemia,
Looking for the little love-tale
That never came true
At the door of the house

The door was an absurd thing
Yet it was passable
They quotidienly passed through it
It was this shape

Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows
They knew it was important to them
This being of who they were
They were themselves
Corporeally transcendentally consecutively
conjunctively and they were quite complete

In the evening they looked out of their two windows
Miovanni out of his library window
Gina from the kitchen window
From among his pots and pans
Where he so kindly kept her
Where she so wisely busied herself
Pots and Pans she cooked in them
All sorts of sialagogues
Some say that happy women are immaterial

So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative
an instigation of the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man
hidden beneath her hoop
Ho for the blue and red of her
The silent eyelids of her
The shiny smile of her

Ding dong said the bell
Miovanni Gina called
Would it be fitting for you to tell
the time for supper
Pooh said Miovanni I am
Outside time and space

Patience said Gina is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish appropriately delectable

What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans
One never asked the other
So they the wise ones eat their suppers in peace

Of what their peace consisted
We cannot say
Only that he was magnificently man
She insignificantly a woman who understood
Understanding what is that
To Each his entity to others
their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion
to the annexed their liberty
To man his work
To woman her love
Succulent meals and an occasional caress
So be it
It so seldom is

While Miovanni thought alone in the dark
Gina supposed that peeping she might see
A round light shining where his mind was
She never opened the door
Fearing that this might blind her
Or even
That she should see Nothing at all
So while he thought
She hung out of the window
Watching for falling stars
And when a star fell
She wished that still
Miovanni would love her to-morrow
And as Miovanni
Never gave any heed to the matter
He did

Gina was a woman
Who wanted everything
To be everything in woman
Everything everyway at once
Diurnally variegate
Miovanni always knew her
She was Gina
Gina who lent monogamy
With her fluctuant aspirations
A changeant consistency
Unexpected intangibilities

Miovanni remained
Monumentally the same
The same Miovanni
If he had become anything else
Gina’s world would have been at an end
Gina with no axis to revolve on
Must have dwindled to a full stop

In the mornings she dropped
Cool crystals
Through devotional fingers
Saccharine for his cup
And marketed
With a Basket
Trimmed with a red flannel flower
When she was lazy
She wrote a poem on the milk bill
The first strophe Good morning
The second Good night
Something not too difficult to
Learn by heart

The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table
Greasy cleanliness of the chopper board
The coloured vegetables
Intuited quality of flour
Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal
Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses
Pet simplicities of her Universe
Where circles were only round
Having no vices.

Human Cylinders

The human cylinders
Revolving in the enervating dusk
That wraps each closer in the mystery
Of singularity
Among the litter of a sunless afternoon
Having eaten without tasting
Talked without communion
And at least two of us
Loved a very little
Without seeking
To know if our two miseries
In the lucid rush-together of automatons
Could form one opulent well-being

Simplifications of men
In the enervating dusk
Your indistinctness
Serves me the core of the kernel of you
When in the frenzied reaching-out of intellect to intellect
Leaning brow to brow communicative
Over the abyss of the potential
Concordance of respiration
Shames
Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory
And reciprocity
Of conception
And expression
Where each extrudes beyond the tangible
One thin pale trail of speculation
From among us we have sent out
Into the enervating dusk
One little whining beast
Whose longing
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
And one elastic tentacle of intuition
To quiver among the stars

The impartiality of the absolute
Routs the polemic
Or which of us
Would not
Receiving the holy-ghost
Catch it and caging
Lose it
Or in the problematic
Destroy the Universe
With a solution.

The Black Virginity

Baby Priests
On green sward
Yew-closed
Silk beaver
Rhythm of redemption
Fluttering of Breviaries

Fluted black silk cloaks
Hung square from shoulders
Truncated juvenility
Uniform segregation
Union in severity
Modulation
Intimidation
Pride of misapprehended preparation
Ebony statues training for immobility
Anaemic jawed
Wise saw to one another

Prettily the little ones
Gesticulate benignly upon one another in the sun buzz⁠—
Finger and thumb circles postulate pulpits
Profiles forsworn to Donatello
Munching tall talk vestral shop
Evangelical snobs
Uneasy dreaming
In hermetically-sealed dormitories
Not of me or you Sister Saraminta
Of no more or less
Than the fit of Pope’s mitres

It is an old religion that put us in our places
Here am I in lilac print
Preposterously no less than the world flesh and devil
Having no more idea what those are
What I am
Than Baby Priests of what “He” is
or they are⁠—
Messianic mites tripping measured latin ring-a-roses
Subjugated adolescence
Retraces loose steps to furling of Breviaries
In broiling shadows
The last with apostolic lurch
Tries for a high hung fruit
And misses
Anyway it is inedible
It is always thus
In the Public Garden.

Parallel lines
An old man
Eyeing a white muslin girl’s school
And all this
As pleasant as bewildering
Would not eventually meet
I am forever bewildered
Old men are often grown greedy⁠—
What nonsense
It is noon
And salvation’s seedlings
Are headed off for the refectory.

Lions’ Jaws

O far away on the Benign Peninsular
. . . . .
That automatic fancier of lyrical birds
Danriel Gabrunzio
with melodious magnolia
perfumes his mise-en-scène
where impotent neurotics
wince at the dusk

The national arch-angel
loved
several countesses
in a bath full of tuberoses
soothed by the orchestra
at the “Hotel Majestic Palace”

. . . the sobbing
from the psycho-pathic wards
of his abandoned harem
purveys amusement for “High Life”

The comet conqueror
showers upon continental libraries
translated stars . . .
accusations of the alcove
where
with a pomaded complaisance
he trims rococo liaisons . . .
. . . a tooth-tattoo of an Elvira
into a Maria’s flesh

And every noon
bare virgins riding alabaster donkeys
receive Danriel Gabrunzio
from the Adriatic
in a golden bath-towel
signed with the zodiac
in pink chenille

Defiance of old idolatries
inspires new schools
. . . .
Danriel Gabrunzio’s compatriots
concoct new courtships
to intrigue
the myriad-fleshed Mistress
of “the Celebrated”

The antique envious thunder
of Latin littérateurs
rivaling Gabrunzio’s satiety
burst in a manifesto
notifying women’s wombs
of Man’s immediate agamogenesis
. . . Insurance
of his spiritual integrity
against the carnivorous courtesan
. . . Manifesto
of the flabbergast movement
hurled by the leader Raminetti
to crash upon the audacious lightning
of Gabrunzio’s fashions in lechery
. . . and wheedle its inevitable way
to the “excepted” woman’s heart
her cautious pride
extorting betrayal
of Woman wholesale
to warrant her surrender
with a sense of . . . Victory

Raminetti
cracked the whip of the circus-master
astride a prismatic locomotive
ramping the tottering platform
of the Arts
of which this conjuring commercial traveller
imported some novelties from
Paris in his pocket . . .
souvenirs for his disciples
to flaunt
at his dynamic carnival

The erudite Bapini
experimenting
in auto-hypnotic God-head
on a mountain
rolls off as Raminetti’s plastic velocity
explodes his crust
of library dust
and hurrying threatening nakedness
to a vermilion ambush
in flabbergastism
. . . he kisses Raminetti
full on his oratory
in the arena
rather fancying Himself
in the awesome proportions
of an eclectic mother-in-law
to a raw ménage.

Thus academically chaperoned
the flabbergasts
blaze from obscurity
to deny their creed in cosy corners
to every feminine opportunity
and Raminetti
anxious to get a move on this beating-Gabrunzio-business
possesses the women of two generations
except a few
who jump the train at the next station . . .
. . . while the competitive Bapini
publishes a pretty comment
involving woman in the plumber’s art
and advertises
his ugliness as an excellent aphrodisiac

Shall manoeuvres in the new manner
pass unremarked?
. . .
These amusing men
discover in their mail
duplicate petitions
to be the lurid mother of “their” flabbergast child
from Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias
Imna Oly
(secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause)
. . . .
While flabbergastism boils over
and Ram: and Bap:
avoid each other’s sounds
This Duplex-Conquest
claims a “sort of success”
for the Gabrunzio resisters.

Ignoramus

Shut it up

Sing silence
To destiny
Give half-a-crown
To a magician
Half a glance
To window-eclipse
And count the glumes
Of your day’s bargaining
Lying
In the lining
Of your pocket
While compromising
Between the perpendicular and horizontal
Some other tramp
Leans against
The night-nursery of trams

Puffs of black night
Quiver the neck
Of the Clown of Fortune
Dribble out of his trouser-ends
In dust-to-dust
Till cock-kingdom-come-crow
You can hear the heart-beating
Accoupling
of the masculine and feminine
Universal principles
Mating
And the martyrdom of morning
Caged with the love of houseflies
The avidity of youth
And incommensuration.

Day-spring
Bursting on repetition
“My friend the Sun
You have probably met before”
Or breakfasting on rain
You hurry
To interpolate
The over-growth
Of vegetation
With a walking stick

Or smear a friend
With a greasy residuum
From boiling your soul down
You can walk to Empyrean to-gether
Under the same
Oil-silk umbrella

“I must have you
Count stars for me
Out of their numeral excess
Please keep the brightest
For the last”

Songs to Joannes

The Dead

We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off

Of infinite elastic
Walking the ceiling
Our eyelashes polish stars

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle
Of a descendant
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams

Fixing the extension of your reactions
Our shadow lengthens
In your fear

You are so old
Born in our immortality
Stuck fast as Life
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension

We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness

Having swallowed your irate hungers
Satisfied before bread-breaking
To your dissolution
We splinter into Wholes
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries
In our busy ashbins
Stink the melodies
Of your
So easily reducible
Adolescences

Our tissue is of that which escapes you
Birth-Breaths and orgasms
The shattering tremor of the static
The far-shore of an instant
The unsurpassable openness of the circle
Legerdemain of God

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours

The mouthed echoes of what
Has exuded to our companionship
Is horrible to the ear
Of the half that is left inside them.

O Hell

To clear the drifts of spring
of our forbears’ excrements
and bury the subconscious archives
under unaffected flowers

Indeed⁠—
our person is a covered entrance to infinity
choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods
caress the sanctity of Adolescence
in the shaft to the sun.

Mexican Desert

The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive
trailing her rattling wooden tail
into the jazz-band sunset.⁠ ⁠…

The mountains in a row
set pinnacles of ferocious isolation
under the alien hot heaven

Vegetable cripples of drought
thrust up the parching appeal
cracking open the earth
stump-fingered cacti
and hunch-back palm trees
belabour the cinders of twilight.⁠ ⁠…

Perlun

the whipper snapper child of the sun
His pert blonde spirit
scoured by the Scandinavian Boreas
His head
an adolescent oval
ostrich egg
The victorious silly beauty of his face
awakens to his instincts

A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold
he puts the world
to the test of intuition

Smiling from ear to ear
Living from other hands to mouth

Holding in immaculate arms
the syphilitic sailor
on his avoided death bunk
or the movie vamp
among the muffled shadows of the shrubberies⁠⸺

Picking lemons in Los Angeles broke

The education of “Prince Fils à Papa”
How low men die
How women love⁠—
The rituals of Dempsey and Carpentier

Perlun
asks “Do these flappers of the millionaires
think I’m a doll for anyone to pat?”

Poe

a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights

sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights

Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles

sing burial rites

Apology of Genius

Ostracized as we are with God⁠—
The watchers of the civilized wastes
reverse their signals on our track

Lepers of the moon
all magically diseased
we come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores

unknowing
how perturbing lights
our spirit
on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty

Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws

You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny⁠—

The cuirass of the soul
still shines⁠—
And we are unaware
if you confuse
such brief
corrosion with possession

In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewelry of the Universe
—the Beautiful⁠—

While to your eyes
A delicate crop
of criminal mystic immortelles
stands to the censor’s scythe.

Brâncuși’s Golden Bird

The toy
become the aesthetic archetype

As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal

A naked orientation
unwinged unplumed
—⁠ ⁠the ultimate rhythm
has lopped the extremities
of crest and claw
from
the nucleus of flight

The absolute act
of art
conformed
to continent sculpture
—⁠ ⁠bare as the brow of Osiris⁠ ⁠—
this breast of revelation
an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames
in labyrinths of reflections
This gong
of polished hyper aesthesia
shrills with brass
as the aggressive light
strikes
its significance

The immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews⁠ ⁠…
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

Joyce’s Ulysses

The Normal Monster
sings in the Green Sahara

The voice and offal
of the image of God

make Celtic noises
in these lyrical hells

Hurricanes
of reasoned musics
reap the uncensored earth

The loquent consciousness
of living things
pours in torrential languages

The elderly colloquists
the Spirit and the Flesh
are out of tongue⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

The Spirit
is impaled upon the phallus

Phoenix
of Irish fires
lighten the Occident

with Ireland’s wings
flap pandemoniums
of Olympian prose

and satirise
the imperial Rose
of Gaelic perfumes
—⁠ England
the sadistic mother
embraces Erin⁠ ⁠—

Master
of meteoric idiom
present

The word made flesh
and feeding upon itself
with erudite fangs
The sanguine
introspection of the womb

Don Juan
of Judea
upon a pilgrimage
to the Libido

The Press⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
purring
its lullabyes to sanity

Christ capitalised
scourging
incontrite usurers of destiny
—⁠ in hole and corner temples

And hang
The soul’s advertisements
outside the ecclesiast’s Zoo

A gravid day
spawns
guttural gargoyles
upon the Tower of Babel

Empyrean emporium
where the
rejector⁠ ⁠—⁠ recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub rosâ⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

Crab-Angel

An atomic sprite
perched on a polished
monster-stallion
reigns over Ringling’s revolving
trinity of circus attractions

Something the contour
of a captured crab
waving its useless pearly claws

From a squat body
pygmy arms
and bow legs
with their baroque calves
curve in a bi-circular attitude
to a ballerina’s exstacy

An effigy of Christmas Eves
smile-cast among chrysanthemum curls
it seems a sugar angel
while from a rose flecked ruff of gauze
its manly legs
stamp on the vast rump of the horse

An iridescent speck
dripped from a rainbow
onto an ebony cloud

Crab-Angel I christen you
minnikin of masquerade sex

Helen of Lilliput?
Hercules in a powder puff?

Automaton bare-back rider
the circus-master
jerks
your invisible pendulence
from an over-head pulley
to your illusory
leaps in up-a-loft

signs
the horse
racing the orchestra
in rushing show
throw
his whimsy wire-hung dominator

to dart
through circus skies of arc-lit dust
Crab-Angel like a swimming star

clutching the tail end of the Chimera
An aerial acrobat
floats on the coiling lightning
of the whirligig

lifts
to the elated symmetry of Flight⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

A startled rose
whirls in the chaos of the hoofs

The jeering jangling
jazz
crashes to silence

The dwarf⁠—
subsides like an ironic sigh
to the soft earth
and ploughs
his bow-legged way
laboriously towards the exit
waving a yellow farewell with his perruque

Der Blinde Junge

The dam Bellona
littered
her eyeless offspring
Kriegsopfer
upon the pavements of Vienna

Sparkling precipitate
the spectral day
involves
the visionless obstacle

this slow blind face
pushing
its virginal nonentity
against the light

Pure purposeless eremite
of centripetal sentience

Upon the carnose horologe of the ego
the vibrant tendon index moves not

since the black lightning desecrated
the retinal altar

Void and extinct
this planet of the soul
strains from the craving throat
in static flight upslanting

A downy youth’s snout
nozzling the sun
drowned in dumbfounded instinct

Listen!
illuminati of the coloured earth
How this expressionless “thing”
blows out damnation and concussive dark

Upon a mouth-organ

The Starry Sky of Wyndham Lewis

who raised
these rocks of human mist

pyramidical survivors
in the cyclorama of space

In the
austere theatre of the Infinite
the ghosts of the stars
perform the “Presence”

Their celibate shadows
fall
upon the aged radiance
of suns and moons

—The nerves of Heaven
flinching
from the antennae
of the intellect
—the rays
that pierce
the nocturnal heart
The airy eyes of angels
the sublime
experiment in pointillism
faded away

The celestial conservatories
blooming with light
are all blown out

Enviable immigrants
into the pure dimension
immune serene
devourers of the morning stars of Job

Jehovah’s seven days
err in your silent entrails
of geometric Chimeras

The Nirvanic snows
drift⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
to sky worn images

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose