His own minion in that nation,
He eats like a king, thinks like a stool.
All of his words are defecation.
His actions insipidly cruel,
He pounds his fist on the able,
Whips his army like a mule.
Hacksaw and hammer and Babel
Bang on the running heads
Of corpses on the embalming table.
He dreams of flowing Red,
Of flags and blood, this revelation:
The elimination of the dead
And his exalted exaltation.
I woke to the voice of the Caller
Saying “Call me. It is late.”
Like a Saturday night brawler
I responded with physical hate,
But it was too close, too soon.
(My challenges do not abate.)
I recall the sound, an ear-worm tune,
Like a long undiscovered cancer,
The dire gift of an angel or goon.
It’s too late to become a dancer.
I’m just a word-addled scrawler
With one question and no answer:
Do flying sparrows grow smaller?
Afraid of heights, I climbed a tower
Made of steel and wooden stairs.
At the top I watched clouds cower
From the sun. I whistled ancient airs
As I teetered on a platform
And vultures flew by in pairs.
I existed in the eye of a storm
With no lightning, wind, or rain
Blasting my human form.
I refused to celebrate the pain
That grew inside me on the hour.
I saw myself look down again —
Fall like a meteor shower.
The man, like a trackless train,
Makes his own determined grooves
With the churning of his brain.
Mud up to his axles, he moves
On his earthbound odyssey.
(Not one goddess approves.)
He’ll see the grassy sea
As he sinks into the sand.
“Now,” he cries, “for Persephone!”
A neap tide drowns the land,
While he, chugging into the main,
Discovers himself unmanned,
Rudderless, sane, and insane.
Feb. 2, 2022, was the 100th anniversary of
James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Music in time: evanescent,
Humming ghosts of tempo,
Neither past nor present,
Equally fast and slow,
Epitomes of entropy.
Violins sing, horns blow
A memory of melody,
A broken string on a bow,
One chord of a threnody.
Staffs roll row on row
In their staccato descent,
A momentless flow
Of tones, incandescent.
My body is richly scarred
As if caught in an avalanche.
It’s crisscrossed and barred —
Lines of sewn flesh branch,
Nose and brow bear hyphens,
Once pink areas, burned, blanch.
Time ravages us with its sins,
Which have nothing to do with will,
But the vulnerability of skins.
Not one baby’s molecule is still
In us after fifty years, discarded
Without changing us, until
We are perfect again, unmarred.
The coming of the naked year
Is announced by desiccated corn,
Its leaves quivering with fear.
These fields will never be shorn,
New seeds never sown —
Nothing slouches to be born.
We have given all we own
To the bankers and the lords
And secured only blood by loan.
Our shacks are hollow gourds,
No water to drink, only beer.
There’s no strength in hordes.
Bawds lift their skirts and leer.
Note: Terzata is a term of my own invention, a conflation of "terza" as in"terza rima" and "sonata." Other than the varying number of feet per line, the difference from terza rima is that each Terzata ends with a quatrain whose second and fourth rhyme is the same as the poem's beginning rhyme, and is composed of 13 lines (terza rima can be of any length). The first 30 Terzata, written several years ago, can be found here: 30 Terzata
