prophetic bullshit.

letter to a friend. resign resign resign

Do you have time to read all of this? Of course not. But I send it anyway, because you appreciate my work. This is mostly collage, save the beginning; poems I first wrote when I decided it was my job to do, mainly between ages sixteen and twenty. Before I knew you, friend. They lay buried for years in documents I discarded as the work of a facile, though nubile, but puerile intelligence; now I see a lyricism in them, have, enough, to put them together as a whole symphony of language. There is something here, my friend; there’s always been. The subject matter weaves in and out, but the main points are stuck to, and I believe there was when I was younger a more linear pattern of thinking that developed, poem to poem. They work as a whole. The motif of the buildings, think of that if you bother to scour this. That I build and build here, both literally and figuratively. That’s always been a favorite image of mine. There’s throwbacks to Whitman and his Western Star; the moon, of course. Night, death, the mother, and the sea are the fourfold makeup of the “Sea-Drift” elegies. The mother is noticeably absent in this damnable cornucopia; death is noticeably present, as is the bending sickle of time, apparent even in the first suites. And the sea, the sea and the moon, tie together in various places in various ways. These were the first poems I ever wrote, my friend; and that they reveal something I have now lost, that is, something nearly pentameter, more serene, if a little outdated, is true. But these were the poems that gave me hope for working towards something. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write again. There’s a mental draught, now; an immediate hesitance at the point I would have been able to sit down and pen something. I needed the pitch of that moment; I don’t have it anymore. I hope you understand I’ve devolved into a rather awkward, abridged character of myself. It makes me sad, and I can only gloomily look upon this castle of words I’ve made, and wonder at a person I could have been, and once was.

ECLIPSE.
When my skin is dusted with lye
When the bottom falls further down
When I can no longer see thru both eyes
And the WORLD drowns, for the last time
	                          In a peaceful lake

When the eclipse is broken, when it
Subsumes itself and includes
Both sides of the sun and of the moon
Rending both from both—
The WORLD flips like a galactic acrobat
Twisting inhumanly to fit the form of an inhuman judgment
	                          That sizzles in the common mind
As an egg of the apocalypse
	     Fractured, the pathetic membrane left
To bleed out and fry on the pavement, scorching
Under the heat of some distant,
Powerful star we once had praised

When the ellipse is deranged
When the seasons go quickly flat
When the WORLD is no longer strange-
-To those who see it as made for a reason
And, finding no reason, implant strangeness
                               And imbue the ageless
With screwball delineations, DEATH,
The idea of it, of dying, shifting frictions
In our heads, as like-
                 -The crepitation of old leaves on the floor,
Each fear crackling beneath our feet on the path. No,

When I am dead, the WORLD will be dead
I will not be happy I will not be grim
I will look for her
—And find Myself in the spaces
	               The spaces where I did not look
While I was alive, and while the hook of the moon
Turned back to a circle from the eclipse too soon

makeshift. #7

Exploit a situation and

watch it shrivel up and

die before you.

Watch whatever it once had been

lose all value. Listen,

says memory; observe,

says knowledge. But

when these two things

are wedded it can get

tricky. If something means something

to you then why not express it? Well,

no matter what,

people will be affected by you,

your choices.

An Englishman in Montreal: Masthead