Back Then Skirts Were Not Merely Skirts But Light Breezes Women Used to Wear And They Themselves Knew That Well

 

“Now how can I get myself dancers

and singers with skirts like breezes

and fans like the moving moon?”

Wu Zao (1799-1862), The Fake Image

 

It is auspicious and good for us

to be reminded by Wu Zao’s

venerable 19^th century voice

that skirts in bygone days

were not just skirts—

 

but breezes or zephyrs,

undulating, serpentine,

fluttering, and swirling

like the sinuous Wind

who set down Psyche

 

into Eros’ clasping arms

as told in Apuleius’ Tale

of the Golden Ass—the only

Roman novel to survive intact

the sinful burnings of old books.

How Many Senses Come to Autumn Hearts?

 

The air’s pounded blue

in the wake of the nighttime rain,

and this too can prove

that Autumn has begun anew

 

            by splitting light and dark.

Into two precisely equal parts,

            but with a gentle tip—

towards the advancing night.

 

And the trees, once more

in going out, are trying to flash

            their toying pink or rouge

 

just as the soil grows again softer,

moist—like a poem’s gentle speech

            when readied to be tilled.

Capitalism in Its Highest and Lowest Form Of Terminal Decay and Decomposition As the Sole and Endless Nigredo Stage

 

The Black Sun, the Demiurge of Hell,

the “God” of the Nazi SS.

 

In the nineteenth century, the British Empire

unleashed on China the Wars of Opium—

and, no, not to turn them into Keats or Poes,

but to reset them into slates shorn of minds,

 

which the Chinese won’t forget or forgive.

And then, Wunder über den Wundern,

Leviathan, the Hydra, the State of the Deep,

took the best brains of the Nazis in—some

 

to help her consume the USSR in a nuclear

holocaust fire and others to apply the darkest

of the darkest arts—to culture and plant

the new, utterly compliant Frankensteins

 

through the Nigredo by hellish deaths,

the sharpest shattering of the mind,

the blackest-black putrefaction,

the mind’s demonic overthrow,

 

darkening and Saturnization.

Mocking, then they dubbed

this after a butterfly, now but a

token of the soul who cannot help

 

but pass and spread that evil code

by which she was slain and razed

and re-written into its own brood—

“the black vision—the fashion

 

of a prideful spell—the sickness

that is Doom” according to

Ginsberg in “The Eye

[That] Altering Alters All”

 

and “On Reading William

Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’”—

“a vision of death and dread”

(“Do We Understand Each Other?”).

 

 

And then, Wunder über den Wundern!

what the British did to the Chinese,

the Deep State, the State of the Abyss,

Tehóm, the Abode of the Dead,

 

did in America to the Blacks

and flooded with drugs,

those solvent deaths,

many others too

 

thus, turning cities

into tombs of souls

in madness and trance

where “the visions

 

of the dead” in “dead eyes,”

no longer understanding

or giving a damn about

classical poetry and music,

 

but “needing a new

[measureless] measure”

began making new

MKULTRA songs,

 

“written in sickness”

(“The Voice of Rock,”

“Sonnet II,” “Vision 1948,”

and “The 1949 Pater-Son

 

Letter to W.C. Williams”).

And it was once more

like the old Imperial Magic

from Apuleius’ Golden Ass

 

when the Ass gets to eat the Rose

and sees “the Sun at Midnight,”

the Nether Sun of the Nether Land,

and turns into a stone with makeup

 

where the gods of Hell and Death,

“the sole sovereign[s] over all

the lifeless and all the beasts,”

are placed above the Heavens’ Gods,

 

and the Empire’s best murderess

and harlot entertains him

in the Colosseum on a couch—

but that Stranger in a Hood,

 

Saturn, the Black Sun, the Abyss,

Tehóm, Void, and Rage, and Flood,

as Ginsberg wrote to W.C. Williams,

is now out “anywhere in America.”