Lucifer Sansfoi
Varlet Sansfoi
Omer Perdieu
I.B.Perdie
Billy Perdy
I’ll unwind your
guts from Durham
to Dover
and bury em
in Clover—
Your psalms I’ll ‘ave
engraved
in your toothbone—
Your victories
nilled—
You jailed under
a woman’s skirt
of stone—
Stone blind woman
with no guts
and only a scale—
Your thoughts and letters
Shandy’d about
in Beth
(Gaelic for grave).
Your philosophies
run up your nose
again—
Your confidences
and essays bandied
in ballrooms
from switchblade
to switchblade
—Your final
duel with
sledge hammers—
Your essential
secret twinned
to buttercups
& dying—
Your guide to 32
European cities
scabbed in Isaiah
—Your red beard
snobbed in
Dolmen ruins
in the editions
of the Bleak—
Your saints and
Consolations bereft
—Your handy volume
rolled into
an urn—
And your father
and mother besmeared
at thought of you
th’unspent begotless
crop of worms
—You lay
there, you
queen for a
day, wait
for the “fen-
sucked fogs”
to carp at you
Your sweety beauty
discovered by No Name
in its hidingplace
till burrs
part from you
from lack
of issue,
sinew, all
the rest—
Gibbering quiver
graveyard Hoo!
The hospital
that buries
you
be Baal,
the digger
Yorick,
& the shoveler
groom—
My rosy tomatoes
pop squirting
from your awful
rotten grave—
Your profile,
erstwhile
Garboesque,
mistook by earth-
eels for some
fjord to
Sheol—
And your timid
voice box
strangled
by lie-hating
earth
forever.
May the plighted
Noah-clouds
dissolve in grief
of you—
May Red clay
be your center,
& woven into necks
of hogs, boars,
booters and pilferers
& burned down
with Stalin, Hitler
& the rest—
May you bite
your lip that
you cannot
meet with God—
or
Beat me to a pub
—Amen
The Almoner
his cup hath
no bottom,
nor I
a brim.
Devil, get thee
back
to russet caves.
A Curse at the Devil, Jack Kerouac
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same thing over and over
For love to continue to be gradually different.
Beehives and ants have to be reexamined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.
Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our days
Late Echo, by John Ashbery
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
Tennyson
