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.)