At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.
In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”
Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.
Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.”
Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher’ s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You’ re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.
This is your foreign correspondent,
Aristotle, for The Poetics,
reporting live from the Mediterranean
where the skulls and bones of a few Egyptians
crown the tradeships of His Majesty,
wave back and forth:
starfish — moons — Februaries.
To my right, our military advisor,
Hernando Cortez,
oversees operations at the Aztec/
Mexican border
where to the left of a stone no longer rising from water
a dove collects
its nest egg
upon the skeleton of a hummingbird.
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he
had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass,
and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon.
It was not that the calendar hadn’ t numbered the days
with an orbital accuracy, its calculations
exact, but like a man who wants to hang a hammock
Tell me not in mormonful numbers
“Life is but an empty dream!”
To a student of the slumbers
Things are never what they seem.
Life is yearning and suppression;
Life is that to be enjoyed;
Puritanical discretion
Was not spoke by Dr. Freud.
I
It starts in sadness and bewilderment,
The self-reflexive iconography
Of late adolescence, and a moment
When the world dissolves into a fable
Of an alternative geography
Beyond the threshold of the visible.
And the heart is a kind of mute witness,
Abandoning everything for the sake
Of an unimaginable goodness
And the man said, what has the dead man left
if not to be philosophical,
I’ ve plenty of time here at my disposal
to solve the deep meaning of it all.
The man peeked in himself and knew
in this life there is no riddle.
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
