Surah Al-Mursalaat—LXXVII. (The Emissaries)*
- Turbulent winds—cyclones—
(as if out of Dante)—
are the impressions of thoughts,
words—
ungrounded in Poetry.
- These whirlwinds compose
murderous hurricanes!
- The atmospheric Disturbance
batters white clouds black,
and then rain smacks and smites,
slaps and stabs,
the earth.
- Oxygen is a waste, except for what’s invested
in Poetry,
what demarcates Beauty (Truth)
from Terror (Death).
All other literature is spittle.
- Those lacking Poetry in their lungs—
or on their lips—
are neither prophets nor lovers.
- Then, when stars go dull, pasty;
get dirty, befouled, as if dipped in ash-pits;
and when the full moon is as pallid
as the dark-white ash of a dying cigarette;
and when the mountains are dust as grey
as the pallor of a European corpse;
then dawneth The Day of Discrimination—
verily, The Day of Judgment—
when a visible minority goes into Paradise
and the vast mass of folks are discarded
and consigned to Hell.
- Lookit: The only folks empowered
to explain Judgment and/or Justice
are poets. That’s blunt talk. Fact!
- Note: Even heathen ancients—
pagan philosophes—
are variously—
but invariably—
destroyed,
like Plato,
for attempting to ban and/or censor poets.
- Well, the same merde will befall
current poetasters, infidels, hypocrites:
They’ll be disgraced, and then destroyed.
- Slaughter? That’s how God puts down
the refractory Hubris of rebarbative critics.
- Damned are those whose moaning Panic
acknowledges their downfall into Hell!
- A mortal?
A being conjured from the worthless squirt of a male
upon whom a female has offered a mothering glance,
and then permitted the germ to sprout
in the same portal from which she pisses,
and behind which she shits.
- Childbirth beautifies
what’s otherwise a sewer.
- The world is rich with malamen (Malevolence),
with songs stuck in lungs,
with unhinged guts!
- The living suffer personal cave-ins;
the dead encunt graves.
- Infidels will be told,
“You’re gonna see four walls of flame,
feel smoke that gnaws at your lungs.
- “Where ya gonna find shade?*
Where ya gonna find ice water?*
- “Geez, Hell spits out sparks
that resemble yellow camels—
or sulphurous griffins;
darkness staggers back—
becomes regressive nigrescence.”
- Damned are those whose mouths are skulls!
They belong to napalmed slums!
- Only the poets—ancient and modern—survive
The Day of Discrimination!
Mark my words!
- Tell poetasters to, please, scrawl their numbers,
screech their verses,
so they hurry on their Destruction.
- Damn those who deny Scripture,
who admire polygraphy,
rather than monotheistic verse.
- Pagans—congenitally pompous—are damned.
- Lookit! Infidels, schemers, and hypocrites,
why not orgy—feasting unto vomiting
and fucking unto Bastardy?
Thy spawn will bankrupt thee,
shatter thy hearts,
then shit on your graves!
- Woe unto plutocrats and their constant
brutalization (dehumanization) of peasants!
- Woe unto the foes of Poetry!
They are gigantically dishonest types.
- Poetry is Truth,
and those who don’t heed these verses,
will discover that God speaks a langue
of tongue-lashing,
echoing Dante,
that will set unbelievers writhing
in abbatoir-level Anguish!
[Edmonton (Alberta) 23 novembre mmxvii
& YEG—Edmonton (Alberta) 24 novembre mmxvii
& Montréal (Québec) 25 novembre mmxvii]
I Corinthians XIII.*
- Cos my sentences stitch drumbeats
(showin my innate flirtation with Percussion),
and I got no trainin in a Gospel vein,
my present Signature should be whistlin.
- And though nowadays I scribe archives of Verse,
and ply that Amusement dubbed Poesy,
I still got no trainin in a Gospel vein
(though perchance I can percolate up Prophecy, eh,
to say, “Hey, I reads ma Bible, don’t I?!!”).
But I be nothin if I can’t steal Thought….
- And though I humour stumblers and bumblers,
and gift all comers my hints and hunches
(messagin even the evil-tempered afflicted),
I get no Profit—
cos I got no trainin in a Gospel vein!
- But Gospel—that “Good News”—is no pretense;
it be Love;
it is, thus, never solitario;*
it outgreets strangers….
- The Gospel of Love opens at a crime scene:
The Crucifixion;
thus, there’s no Frivolity; no flirting about;
it don’t fool around;
it don’t alter correct moods….
- The Gospel of Love credits Obsession,
but nixes Lust.
- The Gospel of Love never flinches,
never equivocates, never deviates,
never diverges, never dissembles.
- The Gospel of Love is tempered steel.
Yep, prophecies can fall short,
verses can be reversals,
words can get choked back and swallowed hard.
Straight limbs can warp crooked.
- For we write a bit and we speak somewhat;
we’re literate as we orate,
but illegitimate too often is our sense—
of our own meaning
as well as how others decipher us.
- But when Poetry thrills through our lungs,
our tongues,
all unpleasant and/or partial expression
is thereby void.
- When I was a child, I imagined
Love was either awful or beautiful,
but still I thought I could view it
as the convergence of the twain.
But when I became a man,
I disliked easy dissimilarity.
- For now, we read and write and speak
unevenly;
are true to our word (pious)
or go opaque (illegible);
but soon we shall be as clear as a steel-nib pen,
searing black words into ivory paper.
- And now abideth diurnal Mystery,
imbued with Poetry,
verbs tense with Intention (Will)
or Memory (the done book);
but the premium Epic be
the Gospel of Love.
[Zagreb (Croatia) 18/10/18]
Matthew V.
- Blessed are the solo, but soulful,
who, though outnumbered so woefully,
avoid—or void—all the corrupt.
- (Fat cats will be voluptuous ashes!)
- Blessed are the irreversibly insatiable,
those who obtain Salvation
but seek extra Grace, extra Mercy.
- Blessed are the avant-garde,
who declare that Abstinence
is a diabolical Delusion.
- Blessed are those who are joyfully hunted down,
joyously slain,
whose tears rain and flood,
for they are anguished poets,
speakers of influential Misery.
- Blessed are the indelibly ugly,
for never are they baffled by flimflam
nor are they bewitched by gold.
They will know truest Love.
- Blessed are the cavaliers,
whose horses stampede toward—
then pancake down before—
the spitting machine-guns,
but not before their hooves graze, famished,
plundering and punishing bomb-craters.
These chevaliers will enter Heaven.
- Blessed are the beautiful poets gone lame—
titled only by their volumes,
entitled only to be read:
They will oversee the obliteration of banks.
- (Poets exceed bankers—
if verses count, not dollars.)
- Blessed is the quarrel between plutocrat
and peasant,
until the fastidious hammer bashes nails
through lace-fringed palms,
and rough, wool-coated poets
straddle ponies, unguarded unfenced,
and scamper into chasms
of railway tunnels.
- Blessed are the poets, gouging on dead names—
their metres broken open so howls escape—
those poets gone deaf to their own Collected Poems;
they’ll be perfect, even at dying—
even in sloppy crime scenes,
so their rhetoric will (ap)peal everywhere.
- Blessed are the secretly bitter—
the unimaginably valid—
who sleep face-down in Loneliness,
who slit open a page so that it bleeds words—
tumbling into placid acid—
black ink, inflammatory—
scary figures of speech;
for everytime one scrawls a poem,
they put off dying a little longer.
- Blessed are the half-rhymes of the married
after the full rhyme of the wedding night
(the hateful slumber of newlyweds):
No other way for their music—
their melody—
to survive—
except as jazz.
They will gripe and squall—
side to side, crabby.
But great poets still go into dust;
and their bones,
once ground up by young poets,
produce brilliant ink.
[Halifax (Nova Scotia) 27 septembre mmxix]
* First conceived in GEC, Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983), p. 47.
* Comino @ Malta, par exemple: A version of Hell in summer.
* Cf. Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), Pimp (1967).
* Translated by Rilke.
* Lonely.