“Some chose to run, many to hide
Inside their temples and rooms,
Where every one of them died
In incendiary tombs.
I walk in a mourning fog
Outside and inside my mind,
Hand in hand with Gog in Magog
And all the rest of my kind.”
“What are these floods and fires
And stupidity admirers
(Viruses in a cracked petri jar)?
How can I fight the coming war
We’re already losing day by day
As we run, slower and slower, away?”
The invention of the assembly line,
The conveyor belt, the repetition
Of a single simple task by one man,
Produces all that is useful and fine.
Let me push the button of ignition
On armor as heavy as a tin can.
No bullet can penetrate my new skin,
Sleek and silver and exquisitely thin.
I'm so perfect now a parade of me
Runs past the smokestacks of the factory.
I'm joined by a smart, lock-loaded army;
As we march, everyone behind his hood,
Goose-stepping, bright phalanx of right for good,
We stare down the decadent and swarthy.
Like a sty in the nation’s eye,
He’s a hiding-in-plain-sight guy,
A cataract of the blind lie —
People still believe him, though why
Is as mysterious as Pi.
A carnival barker, though sly,
And a connoisseur of the small fry
He munches either moist or dry.
He beckons the bucks from on high.
They all trot up to him and sigh.
He has a mantra: I am I.
There’s no disputing that, just try.
There are some who think he's a spy.
We know he’s set the world awry.
Note: The number Pi is considered
mysterious due to its irrational and
transcendental nature.
If you dare to tell him he can’t
The monster starts his dancing rant.
The noise blasts an half-empty House
Where nothing stirs, not even a louse.
His legs lift just so high and pound
And pound the ground like myriad rounds
Aimed to shell the foundations
Of once allied loyal nations.
(He makes of enemies his friends
For obvious and evil ends.)
His confused shrieking grows louder,
Anger eloquent as gun powder.
When dance and rant become one
The work of dictatorship’s done.
My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,
themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.
That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.
As number shapes itself,
we all gradually freeze
into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!
Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.
The caliper and the scale
exact a shade of difference
between mole and melanoma-
sensations bought and sold:
a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,
I beckon like blue oblivion.
Afloat in a dusty tearpool
with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,
mine is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all
beings like themselves...We find human faces in the moon and armies
in the clouds. David Hume
The anthropomorphic follows me around —
In carpets, tree bark, and abstract paintings.
“If I am the figure, what is the ground?”
Each face whispers, “or am I just feigning?”
Or am I the pretext for pretending,
I reason, a message I am sending
To cohere around the inchoate
Only I can look at and recognize?
These flickering (blinked) images sate
My comprehension, if not my eyes.
“My face will melt if you don’t look at me,”
These ghost images say repeatedly.
I too unseen uncertainly erase —
Though an unreal painting could take my place.
How can sound mean to me?
A note, chord or melody,
Or an invisible bird’s song,
Even the long ringing of a gong,
Is merely an evanescence
To the most fleeting of senses.
It’s only in memory that sound
As music turning round and round
Can deliciously endure
Until distilled and rendered pure.
