Fragments Shored Against Ruin

24 October 2015

1

You are the last fighting chance
for yourself,

A chamber, a kingdom
-- Cordelia!

Where is the throne?
What is flesh?

A clock in the hall
A clock and no walls

And spinning
Rome is burning

Tick Tick Tick --

There are things that move the will
that even the atom cannot kill --

There are things there are things

-- If you do not control yourself,
who will?

2

The executive has surrendered
all -- anarchy ensues.

The state in which one cannot say no,
when one cannot stop,
is called chaos today is chaos
and we are revolving in kaleidoscope
houses that looked fun

who am the last fighting chance
for myself, the only opportunity
to be free of that doggerel wretch
who sits on the mind-throne

while, usurped, the executive wastes
in heaps of sentiment and flesh
that wash over all
and bathe with the lime of body.

soma. soma soma soma
take and live.

3

My body waffling through space
and undigested time conceives
Idea -- floats, as it were, above itself
into ethereal otherlands

and waits.

Up, from where is only down,
I fly, and divide this self
into slivers, abandoning each
at the foot of age-old Mind

Who takes them, warping tomorrow
with hands of iron, cold.

I am left unanswered.

4

I fear the smallness of my mind
surrounded by mysteries,

The abstract cave,
philosopher's chains
unbroken,

Bound,
and sinking down.

And are there here no sunbeams,
no exalted forms that dance
on more than cavewall?

5

There are no tunes or strings to play
unbloodied by the rage, unbridled
by fearful faces, names
turned dusty with shame.

How far the sky has fallen,
how far! deep within our bowels

We cannot digest
or swallow.

There is only us -- only the rage
and the cold, swollen cage.
The bruised age.

6

Listen. We will begin
to repeal soporifics
only in the light of more pure
harmonies and form.

There can be no freedom in extravagance.

Love is the beginning but not the fruition,
which comes only through discipline
and a kind of violence.

Once we have established ourselves
at the end of ourselves, and only then,
can we draw from the ashes
some kind of beginning.

7

Is there still a Song,
and can I sing along?

This man, boy, heart beating hard and strong,
'tis mine? And may I be wrong?

I have wallowed verily, wallowed long
in the avenues and twisting ways
of ecstasy and sorrow,

But there is forthcoming joy,
awakened noise which learns to balance
and to hope with poise

The truth of which
is There is There is There.