Mors

Mors
The Angel of Death comes to the King's Room at Night;
His Face shines.
Les chansons soutterrain.
Singing, singing.
The Angel of Death in his flight laughs deeply;
He knows his destination.
It shall be through a dark dream
Into a new life.
Vita Novus.

(...If there had been TV in Paris in 1789, or in Russia in 1917, would the populace ever have carried through their revolutions? It seems doubtful.)

Athens 2

(In all the Great Cities of the World
Walk Secret Cripples
And fools like me, disturbed
By thoughts of purity,
Naive to trust in what they feel.)
Oh, i act very wise
But my all-perceiving eyes
Betray me into countless traps.
Baited with beauty, briefly tendered
Triggered by blundering passion
And left dismembered.
My eyes are fools. They seize triumph,
Clarion-call it to the quick heart,
The heart bombasts the news to the blood
Whose course runs all over
The Sad Republic of my flesh.
My eyes should be ashamed, downcast
After seeing so many false dawns.
And yet, neither eyes or heart
It seems, will learn to be as stone.
Even my curses are cliches,
Even as my hopes are banal,
And in my desolation i only utter platitudes,
Repeated so often before
By stranger's mouths.
Can there be a soul that will not walk
Machine-like to money-making
On these streets,
But will stop and regard me?
Can there be a face of human form, of flesh,
That will neither scorn nor fear me?
Is there no flame that flickers like my own,
Among the striding robots,
Among the smiling statues,
So clear, so clean, so prettily repeating...
What seem, at least, to me...
Banalities?

Athens 1

The roads are long where i walk
The shadows deep in Athen's streets
The people pale
Wearing disenchantment upside-down
On awkward faces
That i see awkwardly.
My response, instinctive, streaming out of me?
It streams briefly, bitten off
Replaced with a peculiar angst.
It is in the inter-connections
Brief surges of hope, sombre rejections
That flicker from eye to eye
As hand gestures to hand.
Should i stop and talk
To the distributor of leaflets
Advertising half-price clothing sale?
She hands me it so neatly, so concisely
Prettily smiling.
Should i stop to ask
The young man on the street
To tell me his life-story?
Would it be short, prosaic, unadorned,
Or might it ebb and flow
With something like beauty?
May as well ask a question of a crowd.
Just as effective to be polite to a mob.
Than to tumble out clumsy words
At an individual.
Where are you racing to, fools?
Short-order march to there and back.
And i, unseen, amongst you.
"I am the secret cripple"
This is what i think to myself on city streets.
Clumsy automaton, tries to fit in
At the Automaton Convention. (no invite)
I am the Secret Cripple
Whose connections are all cut off
Whose loves by every step
Are disrupted.

Edinburgh 2

O loneliness. Every city has a thousand phantoms walking in it and i am but one. And all the phantoms seem to whisper, as they step forward, as their eyes flicker, faces hesitantly turning away- "There is no city but this, there is no city but this."
Western civilisation's greatest and most meaningless achievement has been the concrete pavement and the lonely crowd walking thereupon.
An old sexual brewery smell, magical, moneyed, expansive like battlements and respectable cadavers. A sad taxicab sexcrime got in the papers. Skeletal homeless and drunkards look on joyless and stoical.
A mad old guy stops me in the street. He has a great Russian bearskin hat and huge purple alcoholic nose. He tells me blankly that he had expected the museum (the building we are standing in front of) to be open. I explain patiently (for he seems hard of hearing) that it is not a museum but a theatre, and as such is not open to the public. "I thought i was gonna have a walk roun' and look at all the artefacts." he says with a strangely childish moroseness. He then shuffles off down the street, huffing, with his humble porous nose. A guileless search for "artefacts".... I think that maybe he was a Glaswegian.
.... What a traitor is desire, what a false friend is pasion.

Edinburgh

On Princes Street a girl hands me a red leaflet for clothing sale which a little way down the street i crumple up and put in a litter bin. And old aborigines with beards, rogues of shellsuits and cheekboned blonde apaches. Near to signs and glassfront bookshops clustered sales and signs.
An American girl talking nearby. She says it'll cost maybe sixty pounds, a dull street conversation.
The blondes on this street are equaled only by the brunettes.
Coming up to street halt like great traffic lines moving enmasse.
The great video screen in the record store showing girl in bikini, a yellow sunny bikini and great red singing lips (Lisa).
Oh patrician glamour, oh curlicue, oh bankvault, oh perriwig.
Oh Frederick Street, oh grey David Hume loneliness- fagdoup strewn sidewalk. Give homes to the homeless, Give houses to the houseless. Simple as that.
A party of Japanese tourists giggling. Everytime i put on a videogame i say God bless the Japanese. What will they make of these old crags and oldtown ghosts, can they digest such occidental bleakness and confusion, such Sawney Bean histories of despair?
The most beautiful girl i ever saw on probably South Bridge one November. She was of medium height and build and had fairly long but very dark hair. Eyes looking downwards somewhat despondently or perhaps thoughtfully, a pallid face. It was indeed as though my desire had called her into being.

new poem

This will be a new poem
A grand poem for all the children who like me grew up dead
I will make of my unhapiness a rebellion
I will make of my sadness a great roar of change
That will come in like a swift tide
To drown my enemies.
For outsiders always know the truth
And those who burn with great rage
Will make lasting creations
Of bitter love.
And the poem will be broad and strong
And deep as stone, rough-hewn and true
And it will sing on desire-stung lips
Bizarrely ringing in dissapointed hearts-
To you who spoke of death-songs,
War-chants, or orations at the pyre,
Make for me now a new song.
Give it not to false beauty, packaged, slick,
Commercial, all false desires provoked and spurned.
Instead offer it to flesh and blood, weak and lawless,
Grimy, beaten, striven to a subtler, stronger passion,
Too real to be plastic-packaged, micro-processed,
Cleanly aborted on TV. Give us the real desire,
The upward dive, the ever-new, renewing pulse.
Give us words for our weapons, sharp and true,
Poems that penetrate and blast, songs that shatter
Like shards of diamond glass.
Return us to triumphant grave- so we can jump forth again,
Full now of an anxious fervour, a dancing pain
That will make the old ways fall
That will make the happy liars fail
And we'll cast bitter black roses on them
Shouting in sonorous voices
For a re-awakened joy
Long-lost, regained once more,
Restored.
We exiles will make of our beauty
A revolution.

the catalogue of the heart's delusions

This is the catalogue of the heart's delusions
Because the trend in design is toward simplicity.
Design is just the response to a problem.
(and the problem is man.)
You survive, and you do not survive.
I think the hardest kind of courage to have is the courage not to lie to yourself.
How to get through death, transcend death? A bloodlet, a sacrifice. Transcend death by absorbing and accepting it.
Life is never fuller in us than when Death's Angel places her hand on our shoulders.
What the process of maturity really entails is acceptance of death.
Something like sleep that brings down blackness on yr head,
a cancelling-out, its finality beautiful.
It would be like a black sleek amusement ride carved out of your
favourite silks beautifully dark
It would creep up behind you and boom like a ghetto-blaster
In yr ear so you'd scream in a nervous skeleton laugh
But its beauty is its democracy which is always welcome
And welcoming.
She creep up on kings with the same embrace.
Yes death is female not the illustrated comicbook skeleton
And yet his face was always a grin
And her embrace is
The simple joke of the absolute.
(And yet death is a jest that hides a truth,
A serious secret selfconsciously revealed.)

rock n roll fantasy

Wanna talk abouta revolution? I'll give ya revolution-
As long as you give me barbwire strangulation, PVC choke
Give me overkill nostalgia in a plastic poke. Red neon dawn,
Patchy psychedelic cyberpunk chick... oh i need it to live.
Let me be the dead rose that blooms n blossoms fragrantly,
Give me hot shotgun kitsch, bugshade drum machine, motorcycle,
Aphrodisiac scent package, o give me the killing desire.
Because i have seen death on television, cheap haikus,
Shortstops pre-packaged to sell me. As a child of this age
I love to sell and be sold.
"I have a rock n roll fantasy, is that clichéd of me?"

Empire Waits

Do you know there are places where the quiet heart can go
In the depths of the city where the winds forget to blow
Or on ghostly avenues where stand streetcorner dates,
Or round the penultimate corner where empire waits?
And here there are tinklings of something obscure,
A falling-down sound or a scent somehow pure-
Blown from backstreets of bridges, and burnt clocks that chime
That the night of the city is mine.
There she lurks, the sweet phantom, or anima-shade
Where the glimmers of Friday night fade-
And she steals my wan heart, and abandons it there
To steal sweet summer songs from the wings of despair.
(Do you know there is meaning when crowds leave the streets,
In the dust and debris, in the echoes of feet,
And in those dull echoes you hear a heartbeat
That sounds and resounds with memories sweet?)
..... and the sharp sound of triumph, that follows you on,
Till its echoes are gone,
One by one.
But in that there are secrets, and signals, and signs
Of a voice of salvation whose tone is sublime
From the sad wings of death, and the dull banks of time,
And it sings that the night of the city is mine,
Always mine.

After Reading Astronomy Book

It's known that stars are born to die
And change their courses in the sky,
If they must change, then why not i,
Whose life is borne so fitfully.
If giant stars from vacuums grow,
Then perish in a burning woe,
As endless eras come and go,
Shall i not do the same below?
And if the broad and joyful sun,
That ever keeps his daily run,
From depths of nothingness can come,
Shall he not thence, one day, return?
And thus it is decreed to be,
By forces wiser far than me,
Whose providence i cannot see,
But with whose laws i must agree.
For stars and men in this are true;
They keep the course they're promised to,
And all their cycles are run through,
Although their days are few.

The City's Heart

Where will we find the city's heart?
It's in the faces of the men that gamble and are gone,
Grey-faced like shadows they whisper sexual secrets,
Hands fumbling in pockets, lips loose with drink.
Speaking of nothing but collective and commonplace sorrow-
Felt by fat-armed mammas in brothels and hotels,
Eyes unbearably dark, bodies laden with tribulation,
Bodies upheld by a feverish, anxious love,
A string that sometimes twines thick,
And sometimes wears away to taut thinness,
And then, in long oppressive evenings,
Becomes as fragile as a spider's web... and yet as strong,
Enough to support the kindly hand of death, and not to break.
Behind windows of the city, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out,
And brooding faces are sometimes seen, biting lips, preoccupied
In the great windy gusts of life, in the nameless spaces of solitude.
But o heroic thought, that batters the brainpans of man,
And coaxes him delightfully from love to pain,
To sink and rise and sink again,
Like a pinball in a mad machine...
My heart goes out to nothingness but only finds echoes in things,
And thus the city's heart responds, in ready words of love and cheer,
That you can read, if you are able, in the blank blaze of bars,
In the eyes of strange girls, in the frsh-lipped faces of friends,
Behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses,
Like new forms seen in a joyful dream.

Automobile Accident

On hot summer nights the race began
Moving sideways from steel-shuttered doors of tenements
Reflecting windows empty with dust inside...
The wreckage compounded
To break the forgotten movie's heart
As the midnite show was letting out.
....maybe struck a water hydrant
And the sudden rush of water fell on the dust of the street
....maybe struck a streetlight
Whose dull, dented bruise was seen by chattering gangs
Some nights later.
Like in the mafia movies, the despair was tangible
And, like in them, the horn was stuck in a blare.
And yet the blood looked less real
'Twas comedy blood from city veins
That burst quietly in shock.