F r o m THE DEATH OF SATAN

by gregglory, E-mail the author

Blank Generation, or,
the Death of the Muse,
.......NO, HARDLY

Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly,
He puzzled out a dwindled life-- in poetry
Who, perennial importunist, assessed
His era unfit for 'the best.'

Defeated by the paraphrase,
The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads,
Reciting lines of despair, never knowing another,
Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another
More enduring light.

No longer
The Ariel feeling
Or whipping spirit stronger
Than an evening's reeling.

Not a mirror to the muses' face,
Not Helen, limitless in grace;
Never divinity, never the light angelus,
Nor any, still ephemeral, 'sublimities.'

The age demanded an image
Rapped in cellophane or bandage,
A brain of eaten hates, or laughter
Soulless out of deadened waters.

And no one left to give a damn about 'the Graces,'
And the reviewers live on, indifferent---
Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face;
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.

.........II
Untouched by the amorous,
Stripped
Goes Eros, incomprehensible
To "the masses."

Hieratic verse,
Each head limned in light
Suffers the obverse,
Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight

Yet still he felt, with a savior's amour,
Neither drugged hedonist nor yet a bore,
Limitless possibilities
Like so many leaves
Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door.

The percipient shall rule, discerning
'Neath modernity's fractious overlay
Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing:
Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day.

........III
Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded
Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head
Thrust into the atmosphere,
Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres.

Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation,
The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation, -
Monumental dinosaurs of the heart--
Researched dung and drugs for their start;

At first, a religious pre-occupation
Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces,
Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose
Of an anus in dilation.

Tarry pools
Accept their coral bones,
Steeped in excesses
Of the incorrect and religious.

"BLACK ORCHIDS ON THE RED DOOR"

Black orchids on the red door;
Fitfully the raconteur
Consigns the ownership of elegance
For a few hundred dollars, for a 'superior' glance.

Black orchids on the red door
Mark the poet's stipulated habitat.
Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn....
Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat'

Exhausted by his meditations on the black
Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark,
Striations intermit with rose;
Guilty only, in his ichorous lair,

Of a certain
Kempt Baudelarian repose.

MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR:

Ginsolds of the foetid spawn
Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes--
Vulgar paucity faintly echoed
In the weak light of decline.

Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an anesthetized soul
Blathers his useless abstraction,
A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations
----Unendurable! if not so falsely done.

Enslaved imbecility defiling life....

The age demands an image,
The image that we give it!
We demand the eternal image,
Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed....
..........................DBD

"EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPHONIES"

Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon
....................marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.

Bore-ed by the lack of temerity,
Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces
Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy;
Marijuana leaves placidly
Shading the crib and high-chair.

100 punks, or fewer, or one,
Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality:
Burning ambitions in Waldorf, or SoHo's zone,
Shed from the aether
These symphonies.

With a tongue of justice,
With an eye of fire,
With an ear made fabulous
By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire.

Rotten's masquerades,
Sid's pinioned victory,
The burboned voice of Hell establishing 'blankness'.as priority
In a world floating valueless; incisive,
the eye of ice.

Aching faces brave the astonishing light,
Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction;
Our redemption was individual,
London our capitol.

Our 'decade' compressed to "'77!"
We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven
'inheritance' of 'reticence.'

Youth as a remembered depravity
Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless
Sojourning away from their parents' questioning
Consigned to them the 'aridity' of bliss.

.......* * * *

When dust hath hushed the roses,
Unmediating silence
This crimson-ochre splinter of song
Encloses

On time's blank slate
Lick this, and relate:

'Here twists,
With upraised fist
An Anarchist!'

HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY

Exile first the inconsequent
The casual hand,
Speech procured at secondhand,
Opinions possessed for an 'effect.'

Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim:
Vital eyes
Outweep all that tragic circumstance,
Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise.

Catastrophe hacked at Hector
In his skirt, but the Eumenides
Themselves were mild when Antigone died,
Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee.

Become Promethean, to this purpose:
Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such,
Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and such,
Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe.

DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS

Philosophers of stone
Ungainly shift
By love's bright drift
Undone.

Of unbodied air
Came spirits' enhancing;
Never a Dunciad
But angels' hearts made glad.

Impeccable sirs
They discerned
Exegesis
Spit in sand.

GREGG GLORY

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