Tag: poetry

Light up the sky red
with a red blaze — not blood
red, not even a patriotic flag
red that could be politically
hazy and scared red — but a
brilliant and artificial red
like good communists make
in factories. Then paint.
Paint the house, embassy,
the politicians, dictators,
tyrants, all the ordinary
people and their comrades;
paint them all top to
bottom and the middle parts
too, especially the penises.
Bright red penises of Russia
standing up to be counted
for mother country. —And
don’t forget the women:
the women who take out
their finest brushes to
paint the red lines in
the eyes of their sons.
They get down on their hands
and knees to wipe the paint
off the factory floors;
they stand at sinks for hours
scrubbing the paint spots
out of their husbands’ shirts;
they wait outside the operating
theatre when paint messes the
mechanic’s table; they cry
and scream the throat of Russia
red-raw till the whole land
coughs up blood. Ordinary
people understand this sort
of red. It’s the red leaders
use for wild speculations and
artists paint radiant futures
with it. Red is an image
by itself. Red is hell. Red
is unnatural, oppressively hot.
Red like the inside of a mad
animal’s mouth. Blood-sucking red.
Red on the screen of the blood
film. Historical red. The color
of revolution red. The red hammer
of education. A red sickle
to chop off heads. A shade of red
to blame for everything. Women’s
red. Menstruation red. Red
faces and red sex. Red rage.
Who made the Red Sea red?
The Russians did. Who invented
red herrings? The Russians did.
Who built the pyramids?
The Russians did. Who shot down
the Korean plane? The Russians
did. Who made America what
it is today? The Russians did.

A woman with beans works
Uncomplaining, shuffling them
On wooden platters

Before the eye
Of a prying city
Turning to what’s believed

Is distant past,
Almost forgotten now,
Where all remains

Unchanged: how long
Do we suppose
This stroke of eye

Will leave us satisfied
With likeness,
Or her,

With likeness
To our unreal world,
Not troubled?

You can burn a book but a poem is
logically uninflammable. You can burn
your love letters, your diary, your house,
your volumes of nineteenth century French
pornography; any embarrassing, inexplicable,
unlikable thing that can burn, you can burn.
You can burn an argument by falling silent,
though a word is logically uninflammable.
You can burn the midnight oil, have a burning
ambition or burning desire, burn money or
burn time. Anything that burns, you can burn.
You can burn your dinner, burn the toast
or burn your bra. Burning is a primal power.
You can burn an opinion with censorship, or
burn authority by just not doing
what you’re supposed to do. —Try it sometime.
You’ll like it. A thing that burns recedes
in thought. You can burn Joan of Arc, though
the Church will still live, just to spite you.
You can burn parliaments, or the politicians
in their cars, but democracy will still
haunt you. You can burn Jews but then
there would be Nürnberg and unerasable guilt.
Anything that burns or does not burn,
you can burn. You can tie a nigger to a tree
and go to work with a blow-torch, though
there are now some people who would object.
Anything that burns or should not be burned,
you can burn. Burning is an absolute freedom.
You can burn someone else, burn yourself, or
yourself be burned. You can burn Dresden,
or burn Hiroshima, or burn the world.
Anything that burns or should not burn, that
you can burn, other people can burn, too.

25 years’ culture and girls in string bikinis
Crowd in on the tanned skin and muscles
Riding the big wave of nihilism.
SISYPHUS on a surfboard. CAMUS
In a card-board box. JEAN-PAUL
Turning a blind eye on the sex hungry
Teenagers paralysed with the sudden emotion
Of SENSURROUND, BIG SCREEN, NEW WAVE crashing
On the beach of full-color eternity.
White slides on blue in the corner of the room,
And hard-muscled boys, new to the world
Of DISNEYLAND mount the wave and dance
In the whorl of noiseless oblivion. Late at night
Senseless nothings of water and energy roll
On and on and over and over dead bodies
Banging on the ocean floor. Dawn screams
Its new morning service and television
Sends urgent messages in static S.O.S.
Across the carpet, as half the world drowns
In white, frothy surf.

Though I did not know you, or your daughters,
I know their friends: isobars of pain
Have run in lines of high and low through
All this isolation — you, your daughters,
Their friends, and me, the line connects us all.

I wonder how it felt, tempting the edge?
I see you spinning, in middle winter,
Your body wheeling on the fine ledge,
Platform for your final acts.
I can’t remember if it rained that day.

Train and rail and hot engines express
Their sympathy and warn: we are mindless muscle,
Taut and hard; we are sorry, but
We do not stop for suburbs of the heart.

“All this freedom, my God! What can I do?” —
Was pulling you like gravity, merciless
And the most natural thing in the world,
Toward yourself. How could you resist?

On a walkway between twin towers
Of the English Department, someone has a set of drums;
Others have guitars, tuba, a clarinet.
Walking through the South Lawn you can see heads
Without bodies gathering and talking on the walkway.

Inside some secretaries are bothered
And tutors interrupted mid-sentence in a novel
By Conrad, with that ungracious sound poised
On their commas. Those musicians up there
Come out singing: words fly up off the walkway.

The ———————— begins to fall,
through your mind,
through your work,
on this page. There is nothing
you can do to stop the ————————
being ————————ed up against
the wall. It is a proposition
ready to be executed. It is a joke
with no punch ————————, the space
between • and • where all
your fears and expectations
of acceptance fall in a heap.
————————s divide the heart
of the matter, and are sometimes
——– or ——- when
they drive you to work
on Sundays, because you have
no job. The ———————— loses
its balance, and begins to fall.
It is your mother. Your boss.
Your lover. You, and every
chance you had to be
a free man. It is a problem
more important than God.
It is your problem, as you wait
your turn in ————————, thinking
about this ————————, where you
buy your ticket for the privilege
of executing some meaningful state
ment, by inserting your name
here __________ .