A poem for the 21st century (complete version): VISIONS OF THE EMPIRE
by Jon Rappoport
Copyright © 2012, 2018 by Jon Rappoport
Over the course of the past 10-15 years, I wrote a 5000-word
poem, VISIONS OF THE EMPIRE. You could say that proves I believe in
poetry. I do believe in it.
Here, for the first time, I'm publishing the whole poem in its final version.
Poetry in the grand tradition of, say, Walt Whitman may seem
to be dead---and who cares about poetry anyway? But poems are life blood
on the page.
I cast this one out like a wind across the landscape, with
full knowledge that reading anything, much less poetry, is a dying art
in many quarters. Frankly, that doesn't stop me. I know, from 17 years
of writing at nomorefakenews, that there are untold numbers of people
who can still read and want to read. My articles have found them.
Going against the grain doesn't bother me. It motivates me.
Every day. The seemingly absurd proposition that a poem can have a
life-bearing effect---I hold that view and always will.
The unbound, wide-ranging, free and electric spirit within us
is THERE. We can step on it and bury it and forget it, but it doesn't
die. With that knowledge, and without apprehension, I freely give you
this. Do with it what you will. As with everything else I write, I stand
on the words.
VISIONS OF THE EMPIRE
By Jon Rappoport
This poem is not a warning
This is poem is not an alert
This poem is not a shopping cart in a supermarket
This poem is not my uncle talking about America with a cigar in his mouth
This poem is not about the H-bomb
This poem is not my grandmother speaking Russian in the Bronx a hundred years ago
This poem is not a microwave
This poem is not
This poem is not a robot car on the highway
This poem is not a power outage
This poem is not
This poem is not a peace treaty
This poem is not a shadow across your eyes
This poem is not Karl Marx or Mussolini
This poem is not a molecule invented in a laboratory
This poem is not a political philosophy manufactured in a secret bank
This poem is not a machine
This poem is not a system
This poem is not asking for an answer
This poem is not people dying in hospitals even though people are dying in hospitals
This poem is not bread or the fountain of youth
This poem is not a doctor
This poem is not a professor on a pension
This poem is not a union
This poem is not a dollar
This poem is not a major or a colonel
This poem is America and not-America
The dream America
After money was sold down the river and resurrected on a cross of blood
After a cash-loaded God strolled into town
After the Universal Hospital drugged synapses and drove the wild horses of imagination down into underground canyons
and sculpted androids stepped out in the aftermath buying back their own memories
geologic wraiths spiraled up inside television sets---
their only ambition to stunt prayers for deliverance and kill raw desire---
we watched wildcats of Texas dripping sweat into their high
hats pull black blood out of the ground and send it through tubes of
night to porcupine refineries on the shores of the Body of Christ
apostles were resurrected in knife-cutter fins of long
Cadillacs running hot across the Kansas plains with blondes in the back
seat drinking
New horizontal towns were multiplying on Long Island, stage
flats of perfect geometry coddled in the breasts of hopeful mothers
asking for redemption from pill-addled afternoons and hallucinatory
music cooking in shining ovens
monthly budgets laid out neatly on Formica counters below the knives
distant farm fields dead in the snow
blank-eyed children walking in the snow
cultivating nightmares they would one day visit on Reality
I flew over those fields and heard the crackerbox houses rot and rust as nothing ever rotted before
We tamed the wolf and the copperhead
we broke a pond of ice and sent Promethean serpents to force a
tunnel all the way down to the volcanic hats of ancient Chinese poets
We tracked mobs and gangs and politicians and drowned them in thunderous secret rivers under the Southwest deserts
we launched charges against the bosses and carried our
prosecutions into courtrooms of fish eye and coral and waving undersea
weeds and dragged paid-off judges from their galleon-wrecked thrones
We stood in the blinding sunlight reflected from low slung
whitewashed buildings of Pasadena and El Segundo and Long Beach and felt
the roar of departing space rockets cutting tunnels through the future
and pulling back the future with giant magnets of illuminated dust
We walked through measureless windows of wheat and corn
growing in the middle flatlands under the warm rain of supernatural
mansions
We draped curtains of night in the upper hills of Los Angeles
where the mountain lion and the coyote and the melted mythical Greek
beast roamed like vagabonds free of the Wheel
Under poles of yellow lights, gasping midnight locomotives clamped on to lines of freight cars in the backyards of Chicago
Plastic lilies grew in the pastures of St. Louis haberdashers and department stores
In White Plains we carved a diamond on cracked asphalt and
climbed a decaying elm and walked along the iron railing of the fence
holding rotting branches and threw marbles down on to Davis Avenue and
watched them bounce into the muddy stream of World War Two newspapers
and swollen milk cartons and broken whiskey bottles and torn black
jackets of old soldiers who had died in snow drifts over the winter and
mysteriously disappeared
I ran under trees filled with light green inchworms hanging from long threads until I was invisible
and glimpsed smiling robots sitting in cafes in the next platinum century
In Los Angeles, concrete sunset of three stacked freeways, a
carpet of park in Beverly Hills, old poolroom on Broadway downtown, bus
to San Francisco, a bum holding out his hand and saying On Venus Jesus
will show you machines of love
I saw politicians jumping out of floating windows
their briefcases cracking open
spilling secrets like lazy snowflakes
dazzling in the sun
trillion dollar thefts
naked amazons stashed in condos and yachts
banks sucking money from the vacuum of the heavens
dead agents
in a rock pasture outside Des Moines hitchhiking to New York
glimpses of prehistoric time
before the beginning before the beginning of sacred
money before the first idols were built, before sacrifice was thought
of, sly prophets were trying on robes and combing out their long hair
and rehearsing their future executions
Standing up on a hill past Albuquerque on 66, I caught a ride
into a no-name Arizona town, walked in the foggy morning along an empty
road to a pine-filled snow-filled cliff and stared out at a spring
valley a thousand feet below
In blinding rain I stood on the Indiana Turnpike outside
Chicago pointed east and wound up in the Pennsylvania countryside
driving the car of a half-crippled man with a Bible I met in a Howard
Johnson
our headlights went dead on a curve and a cop pulled in behind us and stopped us
he led us to a fat judge's house in the middle of the night where we paid thirty bucks
then parked on a quiet lane and slept until dawn
early spring in March
flowering magnolia trees
he dropped two Thorazine and told me to drive
and his babbling about Heaven slowed down and he slept
and when we pulled into Manhattan he had me park in midtown
he looked at me with glazed doe's eyes and said
son, I've reached the end of the line, this is it, within a month I'll kill myself
I walked along the astral cloisters of Wall Street among
crowds lapping at honey loopholes in a web of proprietary secrets and I
flew through steel walls into the psychotic fandango of the
international electronic invented money Surge
I recorded architects laying out blueprints for the perfect
human in bunkers of Virginia where silent factories printed minds whose
memories could be selectively erased
technicians built new bodies from tendons and ligaments of
cougars and predatory owls and membranes from soldier ants and feral
dogs
I walked through fields of cactus east of Tijuana
into caverns of mass graves where sacrificed Aztec skeletons still stank in pulsing blood rhymes of a toothless hobo Ziggurat
I sat in the courtroom where the two-hundred-year trial of
America labored like a wounded beast, witness after witness screaming
accusations at captains of production and dark iron-masked prosecutors
hammered their fists on tables and smooth Rockefeller men sat in the
witness box and advocated drugging the population
One Sunday night I walked out of a small bookstore on 3rd
Avenue and a drunken Ben Franklin, wearing his waistcoat and slippers,
his spectacles halfway down his crooked nose, pulled me over to the
doorway of a paint store, and whispered:
"I should prefer, to an ordinary death, being immersed
with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time,
then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my
dear country!"
he patted me on the cheek and grinned
What about the weathered Declaration on which you staked your honor, your future, your fortune, your life, I ask him
His face turns sour
Oh that, he says
They sold it for a war, and it fetched a handsome price
They sold it for a bank, and rated it a fair exchange
They sold it for a choking nightmare called the greater good, and it drained their living blood
They sold it for a legend of heaven under a burning copper sky and it vaporized in the whirlwind
Fifty million video cameras record the washed out moment-to- moment ballet in streets and offices
people stop for a moment in a bulging tableau
light peers in through immobile troughs of fury
complaints are frozen
all the children of America with their endless needs are frozen
We slashed our way through faded blue Virginia mountain ranges ruled by subhuman priests
lizards crawled through the sunlight between leaves on rumbling paragon trees spreading out their knuckles above ground
Through dream gardens of the starlit Sagittarius, coral horses, amber-fed lichen
we walked the Colorado Cherokee Trail glittering with bodies frozen in the silver fog
We flew over steaming cities and freezing cities and came to
the Asia plain of tropical magic where the walls of enduring space were
cracked and broken and the false curtain of the sky lay at half-mast
torn and stained
Here the empire had shriveled and small mobs wandered under saturated space broken off from the Maypole of trance
We still hear a voice of freedom
in the
aether
now freedom barks like a dog
it weeps over stones
it demands cash
it lies in the mud and croaks
flees a burning church
On a parapet at the center of an unknown city, we hear a bovine preacher of the sub-brain announce:
ADORE! ADORE!
We have
A
New
God
And
Time
Is
Peeling off
Around him.
ADORE! ADORE!
Your life
Is being
Mapped out
In steel-banded
Central Planning
Operating
From
The Temple
Of the Just
A gram of license
For every ton of compliance
This is the new energy equation
One
Glittering
Breath
Of
Spontaneously inhaled
Stolen
Money
leveled like an exploding shell
o leader
your only remaining job
is the calculation
of the religious component
how to mountaintop
and sell that vacation view
theocratic meteors
whirling around the crown
what testament
and scripture
will you
invent
for the made-holy parade
of intercellular
electronic
money laundering
(left hand to the right)
how will you
market
the ark
of androids
what murders
will you
recast
as
sacrifices
made
on behalf of
the
rising
membership
in the
temple
of
those
seeking
justice
a node
of memoryless
cold blue light
shining on
citizens
entranced
in trust
Adore!
Adore!
The rebellion is over!
Everything
We hoped for
Granted!
Now
By the blessed
Eye
Capture and Love are the same!
Their
Separation
Was
Our
Sin
We
Surrender
To
The Egoless
Cage
Adore! Adore!
All
Objections
Are
Swept away
This
Is
Our
Day
Our
Hope
Has Been
Justified
In the
Temperament
Of
The Wise
Who
Unleash
A hurricane
To catapult us
Into
The new world
Adore! Adore!
One shapeless limp impulse
Desperately shared by nine billion people
Dissolves
The threshold
Of mystery
And opens at last
The door
To
The everlasting
Life
This is the apotheosis of
What
We have all
Been unconsciously seeking
I see populations surge through golden avenues wrapped around the upper stories of Orphic ships waiting for solar winds
I open books in a shining arboretum, ten-thousand-foot wells pour
from the sky down into stratified layers of rock...
Summer night on an old porch, rhododendrons are thrashed by slow comets of rain
there is a sleep so pervasive numbing the chest and shoulders, a despair so charming as to be final, a titanic loss of mobility
there were buildings in the old World War 2 Paris that looked
like beautiful rotting vegetables propped on the ark of the River
windows scalloped stone sacred mucosal choirs
in a nostalgic vortex
death is a protocol
a virginal reopening of the wound
insignia piping gardens from its royal wax
into the dark
old pleasures run in familiar magnetic channels
Ah, this is old-world death, the happiness of remembering time, a thing of wonder in the thrall of dying autumn
and then we knew what could be lost, and then we knew we were seeing each other fading on sheets of papyrus
and we dropped through the earth
flaming
into the legend of the unconscious
and
struggled back and emerged up into the lights of the city
We move through the halls of this summertime life
the meridians of gills breathing in and out, in and out
and cross the bridges of memory
and are New
We punch through the wax of space-time into the warm rain
we unplug the money presses
we abandon the long steel trading tables and the slaughtering floor
we defect
we drink the root turning into the bud
the bud turning to grain
we brush away the choking filaments of narcosis and finally admit our immortality
we walk in the canopy of clouds
in the canal where time and space are bolted, cloth to cloth
We ride tigers across the Styx into the mud houses of Hades
and blow sacks of north wind to clean the ruined stables of broadcast
memory
We race up the canyons of the Rockies, we float on the Salt Lake in mirrors of gold
We walk out of the house in the middle of the night and watch
the magnolia tree in the little grassy island open white flowers of
joy!
Sing now!
Speak now!
Tear away the seal on the tomb!
MAGICIANS!
MASTERS OF TIME!
in any weather, any season
long forgotten and hidden in hard flesh
they are there!
all the fires are out
all the wars of the bankrupt versus the bankrupt are over
I watched a sleek black car pull up to a house down the block
where an old man who grew apple trees was screaming and three men got
out of the car and grabbed his arms and put him on a stretcher and took
him away to the Foundation, a place where they kept the insane
he had spent every Sunday morning polishing his red car
he had once been a judge
he retired and built department stores
he kept a bulldog in his garage and fed it there
his son who wore gray suits and drove a foreign car
owned a brewery
i dreamed the father was sitting on the back of a white swan who had a leash around his neck
I woke up and went into the kitchen and sat down at the table
I looked out the window and under a streetlight I saw the old man's son putting something into the trunk of his car
his movements were frail
he had aged overnight
I fled through the oily swamps of New Jersey into the bright
green plastic of Delaware and through the Carolinas and woke up in a
pink sand motel in Miami under tropic rain
I hitchhiked down the old 66 from East St. Louis out to
Joplin in the back of a vegetable truck and floated into a diner in
Oklahoma City
In a long, long Los Angeles bar on a slow Tuesday afternoon I
counted six Hindu gods sitting on stools drinking rotgut and
transmitting sign language to their London banker lolling outside the
men's room
I walked along the death harbors of New York
I saw ships gleaming
I watched swarms of seagulls bend this way in the air and flap their white wings and gray wings in the dark morning
I'm walking the cemetery lawns of Los Angeles
now and then a plastic face looms up out of the fog
Boston...in the ocean mythic giants
all their capillaries have gone dry
the moon is setting on page one
intestinal tract of a beached octopus suctioned to a sidewalk
in a small café I look at the faces and know there was universally accepted time and it's ended
We saw old iron ore carriers moving slowly on Lake Erie
frost clinging to their torn-painted sides
pulling along hills of hidden Nevada gold
GM monitor lizards sway down Main St. USA like garbage
machines on the move, guzzling and chewing tin cans, bottles, bags of
medical waste, wrappers, assaulting bins
you're in the reality tunnel again
where predators finger like worry-beads cocoons of demolished light
limbic vacuum cleaners
suck up embers of war
be of good cheer, son, never fear the end, there is no end THERE IS NO END
abide by the central directive--
when you're lying on a slab in the mortuary
STAND UP
tell them they've made a minor miscalculation
recite a few lines from scripture
and stride quickly to the exit
confess to the guards
you're just a pathetic figure
a minor functionary
in a bureau of functionaries
all the way up
tip your hat, grin, drop a few coins in the basket, move on
this universe is
a hell of a vacation
thrills and chills
buy the ticket
if you can't get out
call me
The cosmos is a forgery of the individual
They say the dark arts are fine things
They lie below the gold rings
That surround every living cell
OR you can
Strip naked from the stirrups
Of gravity
Sit with clouds banked over the ocean
And burn in the dish your own name
The great thief said
I have given you
Everything you need
And so it was
Another message
A column of fire
Rising out of the sea
you can lift twelve Persephones out of a Swiss watch
and push an orange train at top speed to Mongolia
each thought on the ruined wreck of sands
is a poet
driving a Cadillac into a living room
(pretending to understand a foreign language
they invented a hundred more)
midtown Manhattan...my father walks from the haberdasher to the barber shop with a new hat in a box
he sits in the chair and the barber winds it back and
shaves him with a straight razor that was lolling in a tall glass of
alcohol
the barber wipes off the blade with a white
linen towel and moves the razor back and forth on his strop and shaves
my father
and cuts his hair
the pool room on 14th Street, old men playing three-cushion
slowly with long tapered fingers, under a hanging lamp one face peeks in
and then it's ripped away as the floor sweeper lifts the shades and the
sun comes streaming through the dust
ever deepening beauty,
there is a little garden behind our house
where vines grow over a wood shed
and purple bougainvillea and morning glory
in this idyll I can rest
I can dream of her while I hold her hand
we set the kettle boiling
and pour the steaming water
and drink a tea of the world
you sold me an empty room
I moved in and found you there
you waited in the rain for me
And I came to you
The home we built at the end of a street
Is becoming larger every day
The poet picks the street on which he will starve
and grow rich
I am painting on a sheet of sturdy paper
A small garden
The sky is on the bottom
The flowers are on top
There are window boxes
I am making the same proposal to you, my darling
I pray to prayer
I deliver myself to you
I say the night and I say down the stairs we go again
never the garden
ever the garden
we are always in between everything we thought
always
my darling,
I'll go with you
into the garden
into the bedroom
into the living room
into the kitchen
on to the rust-colored couch after the sandstorm
when the evening is quiet
the stove is ticking
my dead father is again sitting in a metal chair playing pinochle with his friends
my dead mother bounds down the stairs
she's suddenly thirty again
grinning with the August of the Black Sea
my sister is holding a feral dog in her arms and he is wrapping his mouth around her wrist and slowly quieting down
Not one god
not fewer gods
give me a proliferation of gods
gods in plantains and mangoes
gods in broken chairs in vague Arizona motels
gods in piles of gray wood at the back of a barn in Mississippi
gods in statues on broad plazas in Chicago
gods in lagoons festering with green mold in San Diego
gods on the foggy windows of diners in Western Massachusetts
gods on the graves of Vikings and accountants in New Jersey
gods in silverware and white napkins
one version of what the old Tibetans
called the Great Void:
everybody looks around and tries to figure out what to do
because the long hustle of discovery is over
and all the explorers have been paid off
There is nothing left
except a few magicians
living in cold mountains
punching holes in the universe at will
In Lhasa they were faced with that Nothing
and they turned to it in the eastern sky hanging like a lamp in a long vacated whorehouse
and bowed
that was the only ceremony in the original book
which they later
in quiet rooms
burned in wood bowls
before starting their exercises
Worship?
Decay?
Never heard of it.
And now think of something else, perfect automobiles
streaming down a tropical planet toward the
a mirror lake on which stands a demigod in green pantaloons
who holds all data everywhere in his outstretched arms
and freeze THAT in memory like a sword for sixteen hours
without moving
and finally see universe
is a product
of mind
this is what they were doing
before they wrote the books and ordered the prayer wheels from sears catalog
and jingle jangled their way into a theocracy on a cold saturday morning
they were the dim sum masters
never ordered the same breakfast twice in the holy rivers of energy
took apart the river and the energy
too
down to Nothing
sat in Void for
indeterminate length of no-time
stopping all creating
because they could
and then emerged
those few
magicians in the cold wasted hills and
and said WELL
if you folks want to elect a billion reincarnated hopalong cassidys
as your head chief go ahead it doesn't matter
we're out here on the edge
inventing and destroying dimensions
a painted hand on a canvas disappears down into the mouth of a virgin
a factory in Cinncinati plunges into the production of synthetic thighs
the cage of the tiger is very clean
attendants come in once a day and
scoop up the feces and remove them
they hose down the floor
when they're done the tiger is let back into the cage
and picks up his pacing
Huge sums in bank accounts disappear
Wearing a webbed helmet, you're running across a lake in Liberia with an M-16
an orange bird
walks down
to a small fountain pouring into the eye of an exploded centurion
Disembodied skulls are talking to each other in a Times Square liquor store
what was the greatest war?
in whose name did we lay down our flesh
was the uranium really depleted
how many roadside bombs did you see before the last one
did we guarantee the oil
did we plant the poppies
freedom is standing in a bar on university place and ordering a beer at six o'clock and listening to the voices
freedom is taking a shirt of infinite sadness and folding it up
freedom is sitting in a bus station in a small town and
counting the money in your pocket and watching the door as a wolf trots
in and stares at you
freedom is being as sad as the animals
freedom is falling down on your knees in the street
freedom is a beautiful drunken woman tearing off her clothes
and taking the elevator down to the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in San
Francisco
Raphael's curls
Are wired
From cliffs domed with chimes.
The NY Times
Is a mosquito
On a plum.
In halls of marble
Heralds open the door
Spring
At last
The gold-seated apparatus
Spits out souls,
Tourniquet
Of the faded sea.
South of Los Angeles...dancers arrive early in a giant room above the ocean.
In forest halls, dryads run like crystal.
CON FRER Tito Puente strides into the endless Balboa ballroom.
Timbales, rolling cymbals, chingachcook congas, brass section
put in harness from the ceiling. Tito is sitting in a blue mist. The
slow vibraphone turns over and over and Silver runners flash around
corners.
In the New York harbor
Turbines with numerical rivets
Are driven into light.
Shoreline hardworking men rest on the
Kneecap of a colossal Buddha
Coming into port
when I was a boy
a road among trees
magnolia, oak, maple...
squirrels with great healthy bushy tails ran up trunks
jumped on to roofs
sniffed smoke coming out of chimneys
and in the dark
there were horse chestnut trees dropping polished mahogany
along the little lanes leading off the road...
After the Cross of money burned and rotted
we walked to the shore
we walked into the ocean
we walked on the ocean floor
we discovered the oceanic mind
we swam on the towering waves
we came back to ourselves
we smelled towers of the city
we floated into the city
we rolled out on to the highways of America
we broke veins of golden paralysis in the clock of the galaxy
we rose with our swords and decapitated the Holy Worm
we planted gardens around the wreck of the Babel Tower and invented new languages that would spread like morning glories
knowing the past was dead
I walked out of the house of melting shadows
I bathed in clear water
I sat down by an old stream and waited for the fish to speak
I sat inside a reflection of lunar decay for thirty incarnations
and nothing happened
I walked out of the house of melting shadows
not a closed night or a fearful night or a weeping night or a money night or a political night or an atomic night
the herds of stars are breaking out of their corral
I'm sitting at a cafe
on the beach in Cardiff
blue January afternoon
my mind unwrinkles
the restaurant's empty
a huge whitewashed gull with a red beak
stands on a rock a few feet away
he waits, he looks
mouthless cash/samurai governments in twinkling skyscrapers
I try on soft hats in a phantasmagorical haberdasher on 5th Avenue
in a jar the size of Des Moines I pickle brains of ancient Sinatras
sand in the engine, empty canteens, thirsty in the desert, I
climb the next set of dunes and stagger down into a level-B resort,
artificial lake restaurants women in bikinis fat men children sliding
into blue pools waiters delivering drinks, robot Adam&Eve standing
under a palm tree eating a bowl of fruit, Machine God sitting at a huge
poolside table with a few cronies, he waves me over, the sun sets and
the moon comes up, I watch old skulls of mob defectors rolling like
tumbleweed in the desert....
hollow planets ring like gongs, shepherds bring in their
animals, ghosts in the arbor pick the grapes and feel the warm wind,
we're walking through a forest, the yellow-horned flowers are weeping
with fog, chrome-edged clouds are dropping sheets of loneliness
the universe said goodbye
the universe was going away
there was no JFK assassination
it was a mirage in Texas
Allen Dulles was sitting in the back of the limo
his brains were splashed all over an unknown woman
she was fighting to breathe and squirming
she was wearing a little pillbox hat and a polkadot dress
she jumped out of the car and ran up the street
and no one ever saw her again
the Virgin Mary
the Virgin Mary of Texas
the lilies of the valley are growing in the back yard again
splashed in the Buick majesty of steady spring rain
and the snow is gone
the branches of crystalline ice are giving out little green buds
and worms are crawling in the mud around the porch sniffing roses
Caravaggio talks to Raphael and Raphael talks to Piero and a leg
takes shape
Michelangelo talks to Titian and half a face emerges
Durer talks to Velasquez and Goya walks out of a cave ready to go to
work
we return to the Bronx and visit my grandmother sitting in
her pudding chair in the middle of the living room, she slowly moves her
head and trembles and mumbles something in Yiddish and I kiss her on
the cheek, the mirror sits on the heavy bureau above candles flickering
for the dead in the middle of the afternoon, someone is always dying,
they were dying in Russia and they are dying in the Bronx, there was a
daughter who died a few weeks after she was born and my grandfather died
when I was three, and the candy store across the street died when
bubble gum was outlawed during WW2, and my father's father is dead, he
owned a clothing store and his partner ran off with the cash and now the
partner is dead too, and the books on the shelves in my grandmother's
house are dead, and the plates behind glass are dead, the forks and
knives and spoons are dead, the rugs in the living room are dead, and my
father's mother will soon be dead in the dining room on the floor at
our house late in the afternoon in January, but no one is supposed to
make a move to stop the dying in the way the dying is happening, we are
all supposed to stand by, centurions at a gateless city, the rivers
shallow and frozen, kiss your grandmother, stand back, smile, go over to
the table, sit down, play cards, eat honey cake, listen, listen, listen
Hermes is circling the brick house and tearing tiles off the
roof, he's coming down into the living room and breaking into the glass
cases and stealing the silverware, he's crawling under the piano and
ripping out the pedals, he's moving the laundry room between the living
room and the kitchen, he's going next door to the psychiatrist's house
and laying down the names of 297 mental disorders that will be invented
out of wholecloth in the next 50 years
I'm lying back in a leather chair in Grand Central Station and an old man is cutting my hair
he puts a hot white towel on my face
I enter St. Pat's, it's a huge bookie joint, crowds standing in the aisles, betting on anti-Lucifer
I take a seat at the end of a long pew and fold my hands in
prayer to Piero della Francesca, silver painter of Solomon & Sheba
and Henry Miller of the Rosy Crucifixion and Kenneth Patchen
in his bed of pain and Gregory Corso roaming the streets of Rotterdam
blessings of wine and bread and skeletons growing new flesh
and father Walt sitting in the middle of Times Square his voice a violet
thunder
the President is on television and the Pope is drunk on
ceremonial wine cursing the Church fathers as he floats naked near the
Sistine ceiling
O dream garden of the ancient flower...
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