Poetry: Indifferent, beauty dances for different eyes
By Justin Scanlon Jan 2012
Our conquerors have posted forbidden philosophies
In the market square.
Most of us are illiterate
And needed to have them explained to us.
Now we are interested.
The young are smuggling them, of course.
Two teenagers were hanged just last Thursday.
Three days left to swing for vulture sentries
On the pre-fabricated Aluminum gibbet.
Their funeral chant the hum of contented insects.
The fathers cut them down in the middle of the night.
The commandant wants them arrested, of course,
But stays too drunk
To follow through on the paperwork.
No one has been able to make any sense
Out of any of the texts. Of course.
They brought some to me.
The old teacher, old soldier, thrice married,
Father of eight sons, all dead.
The man who never ran, but whom bullets avoided.
The man who laughed at death,
Whom death condemned to outlive all.
They made no sense to me, of course.
Alone on this isolated farm
I watch the bloated sun sink again
Into sordid purple clouds
Edged in smoky orange filigrees.
My one-eyed mangy cat sits like an onyx sphinx
Mysterious beyond any engraver's art.
Her scabrous head swivels that inscrutable eye
Over the patchy yellow grass
Out here in the highlands.
The soil has joined her tillers,
And abandoned all resistance.
Five years of defoliation
In the name of conventional war —
Once luxurious and fertile,
Now sandy and blistered and home
To 10 odd thousand parasites.
Let's not talk about the children.
Born deformed beyond recognition:
Strangled and buried
Or preserved in specimen bottles.
A proud legacy for our victors.
2.
From his atelier deep in the bowels
Of fashionable Soho, Joe Zuba,
Zen master of electro-digital performance
Expounds synesthesia between Galois vapors
Curling in self similar iterations
To the apostles of the new success:
"The Feng Shui of the new knowledge
Only underscores the urgency
For its atomized encryption.
Our reincarnated Renaissance, born of moronic violence
Unprecedented in its magnitude and lack of dignity,
Projects these values onto the architecture
Of branded mega-consumerism.
The herd is born to consume, defecate and die.
It is not the earth that is overwhelmed
By the human population,
It is the human mind itself.
There are no levers to answer purpose.
What could possibly be the purpose
Of all these jewels in the crown of creation?
The only option for the mass mind is mass narcosis.
Religions had this point by the 20th century.
Maimonides, Averroes, Acquinas,
All expressed in writing the idea
That religious ritual and spectacle was a sham.
They also agreed it to be a necessary one.
It kept people off each others' throats.
To those who express the fashionable view
That religion is the source of the horror,
History is one bucket of bad news.
It was an inadequate and now obsolete bandage.
Too many people with too little to do
Has played a fundamental role in the entropy of every civilization.
Stupefaction is essential to control the unnecessary.
Rhetoric was originally intended to slow the decay.
Verbal technology to sway the masses.
In its finest forms, like Baroque sermons,
Common language can turn all gathered minds
To divine notions.
The king shares an experience with the peasant.
But in the pressure cooker of hyper-technology,
Perversion becomes the rule.
Look at one-balled Hitler and his youth rallies.
He was a seminal rock star.
Light shows, amplified rhetoric,
A hollow pseudo catharsis of demons,
Rendering them all the more powerful.
The self hatred of the mob is directed
With the ease of a gardener's water hose.
They hate what they are told to hate
In a Faustian pact to avoid the pain
of understanding what they hate about themselves.
This is where those tedious, ox-headed,
Puritanical Marxists made their contribution
To the 20th century river of massacre.
Russian leaders killed more Russians than
Hitler ever could.
We hacked this out back in Yale in the seventies.
HEH, HEH.
Take warning from Shakespeare.
Even a little freedom can drive
The groundlings to riot for shackles,
And topple a great man.
There can be no freedom
Without disillusioned knowledge.
How many, even among us,
Can bear the horrific certainty
That every human gesture, no matter how refined,
Comes bathed in a historical ocean
Of massacre and atrocity?
Unspeakable savagery in the cause of civilization,
Imposed on the masses by the masses,
So a few can live well?
And who among us dare disturb such a universe,
Or solipsistic microcosm,
By which we live so well?
The future lies in the past,
Upping the stakes in the oldest lies,
Enhancing an electronic artifice so sophisticated
That it feeds on the most primal emotions.
We have an electronic invasion of the Limbic System itself.
Circuitry extends the reptilian brain.
Art is the tentacle of that invasion.
The artist's body itself will become the ultimate
Author, overriding the tinsel of the mind.
I'll close our symposium
By answering the original question posed to me.
I arrived at the sonic timbres unique to my latest
Best-selling recording,
Through a fractal iteration algorithm
Applied to several sampled gaseous pulses
From my upper colon.
Perhaps my next frontier will be
The Gall Bladder.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Justin Scanlon is a relative newcomer to the area, having moved to Burton from Queens, N.Y., about three and a half years ago. He teaches at Baker College and has performed at the Good Beans Cafe. He also wrote the lyric to Dancin' in the Ruins, a Blue Oyster Cult AOR hit in the 1980s. Currently he performs locally while he finishes Email From Afghanistan and Other Collected Poems.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Flickr Photos
Content : 3349
Content View Hits : 609332