Whenever I saw old lines of writing grow dim and their hidden content become the present day, then I understood. The future is creation’s homeland, and from it blows the word-god’s wind.
— Velimir Khlebnikov
J. V. DJUGASHVILI & PIERRE RESTANY It is not a secret but one does not tell it. — Gertrude Stein Pandemonium of flashing petals The clatter the modems make It propagates a narrowed silence Shapeless — nothing was of miracles The artist had in my dream Forgotten the region I devised (Varied but in no way uneven) Hit the rockface of solitude with the hammer of uncertainty So that the trajectory we objected from No longer corresponds with what is plainly in evidence Tho it is here that a paradoxical but very significant Phenomenon becomes evident Since the apparently insurmountable disagreement is Nothing more than apparent: Exempt from contempt Gods may do what cattle cannot They disassemble themselves Into the panicked mouths of the manic devout Finished growing thing Bound up & dumped in the river or Tossed to shoulder from motor vehicle to Molder on mechanically stabilized earth Let it lie bruised for a monument Dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful * Silence was knowing Speech is now gnawing Nervously on our children’s cadavers Pronouncing death Sentences The flesh be bugged A hitch in the arrangements With teeth set on table’s edge Give a good hard bang Muzzle bloodied To the buzzing helicons’ Omertà & cratylism of Fac-simmed procgen diamat Hopeless power epitomizes prophesizers Visionary incompetents drowningly consulted Give panegyrics of enamel animals & laugh on the other sides of their faces Tell these oleaginous hall monitors of the possible We’ve only got four IVs for eleven V. I. Lenins But all we need Is there in Dufy’s Fairy of Electricity * The hour of asseveration is arrived — The perduration of perjury: I tried sacrifice & then indulgence But my name only moves a few pages back on the list & weep every morning When the orange standby of the appliances still burns & trips the various censors They’ll shoot you dead in the street for no reason Nor motive beforehand nor justification after the fact Make yr will out mate They know yr names & they know yr faces Go ahead of the majestic army Of human thought & aspiration blazing New & strange paths A purely decorative camouflage Masks the spiritual void You can’t hide that boot print on yr brain The manifolds of yr many-pleated fear Sound untold with banned & banded resound Adhesion Unimpeachable Which would you rather be Inmate or idiot Abattoir or organ grinder I’ll pull the wool over yr eyes If you blow smoke up my ass Death can do no more than kill you & Hey look there There’s a bit of subculture under yr cuticles * ( FOR TEIGE, THE MAN HEART-ATTACKED BY THE SECRET POLICE ) NOTHING BUT NOTHINGNESS What we touch the hems of Infinitesimal subdivisions The ghosts of departed quantities Scaling down in intensive degree from Entity to zero With shadow the permanent rendezvous Penumbra that defeats any claim to explicit contact It feels like a weight balanced on the forehead tipping Misses you the common intimate Word The increased meaninglessness of a symbol The expanding of a conceit Feel themselves drawn toward similar deserts Repeat their perilous leaps into nothingness The increased glow of the embers only A reflection of the wind from the bellows Lines that went elsewhere before they went here A point here that points elsewhere Unto scissored deletions Untoward the cutting-out Spilling glory of Blood’s an- Aesthetic revelation Of some easily-seen god Dies in the doorway & Attracts flies almost immediately Content finds the Bible a waste At the heart of which the noisy engineer Can be seen extending his hand to old T. S. Eliot Paper turned to vapor passes Thru obstacles when the signal is off Five flies flew from the F-hole Of a silent violin Sticks spinning on flat flagstones Clocks without hand or number Tick-tocking in concert Petrified as perfect mobile Motile sweeps Of perfect smile Music of decided Disunited time Proceeds by dilation The needle pricked in the tyre The plunger depressed Applause (mostly mechanical) & an Other hand for Hegel’s hands are numberless Under standing hands that Could not understand Practicing the phrenology of spirit & Firmly determined not to soil themselves In contact with discouraging reality Super-vising our buttoning & unbuttoning His big dumb cow-eye God keep us from single vision & Von Neumann’s sleep Pleasure is a late acquisition Scarcely older than consciousness It could be done away with as a fluke Come the call for sensation’s cancellation: Let all that is sweet be salted And all that is salty be sugared Some small furred thing has crawled Deep in the works & died Now its stink is blowing back thru the passages Vision is a fig leaf on the occult genitals of Death As if romanticism required monocles The rattle seduces you & loosens in as it fades A grassy keep from which queens Did scream pain in low list In throes who throws whose throat Yr bug’s-consciousness streaming The mere rumor of yr existence— In many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I’ Oblivion is the finest fervor Puts the errata in desiderata A dial tone in the minds of men BEING IN NOTHINGNESS There is a circle whether or no With a sneeze against it (peculiar heliotropism) I’ve kept the sacred (without a sound — The form of What was master here) The Void — pale-blue sheets the thing we saw After the metal walls A capillary tissue which extends Which guarantees the constant exchange That must occur between Fucking & getting fucked Metempsychics & physics Sacred monstrance or Sacrilegious monster These formalist games to which thought is molded At what point is being irreconcilable With what must continue to be? These things Have a disgusting propensity for becoming their opposites “Being & not being are the same” & yet not quite since the same is another that is like— there needs two for a sameness as well as an identity for a difference Subtle as it may be between a four of two & two, A four of three & one Deception & truth go hand in hand not as opposites in a system but at least as the thickness made up of a recto & verso together The difference between actual & Maximum-possible entropy Which we perceive as order— The further it is stretched the more violent the eventual correction We will be dragged back by a doctrine of signatures This world is no more that alien terror which was taught me The garden bore the fruit The whole fruit & nothing but the fruit Tonic gruel Tectonic plates have shattered for less & the sun snaps shut on such inanities On the windbitten inhospitable rock of consciousness A lichen of conscience has taken hold A fellow, brief on yr tongue Spits backward, parches the heart Proof against the conviction of yr strength The firmament of yr upset In strains strewn the world over Thank you — sorry — please Amen, ahem THE MAGDEBURG HEMISPHERES OF ALIENATION If I stick all my friends with Paper swords & it is just pretend But I never see them again Can I still count myself among the blameless? If by guile or enterprise I endeavor to halve the truth Prised apart to emancipate its stuttering motor Like the sour blood sealed between blades of grass Do I only appear master of what I am mediator? The glue is easier to unstick than it looks (Solve et coagula) Or just as Picking real lackadaisies From imaginary care Keeps me supplied with Work so good it’s almost worth sleeping for Scratches the occidental itch without incident Can you read a closed book With pages still uncut? It can be done but it is difficult, very difficult So let us go on cultivating fields of error in our brains What would make an imposition on me is less than so much grass Now it is possible to learn the technique of love By radio courses with no less results I’ll never see the inside of another annus mirabilis & turn a new leaf, an Unbleached recto There’s something ain’t right with any of this & I aim to find out what — But I can forgive (myself) — after all Some bugs have no wings yet they are perfectly moral I choose my material & intellectual food I do not feel my being-a-thing I am a pretty, clean, mobile thing I have not foregone love I love my garbage disposal unit Aren’t we all Just carrying prairies? Just handling corners? It’s you in the art, it does Speak of yr double & he shall appear Listing But finally OK with Sara Bernhardt’s Leg to lean on At end of day The rag comes away Bearing a greasepaint grimace & a sinkhole opens under yr boss But you lose yr car in the rain
(Poems continued from a sequence in progress—see part one)
