Everyone Chooses Love after His Own Fashion

“When the charioteer sees that face,

his memory is carried back.”

Phaedrus 254b

 

By driving ever closer to the divine

we go on growing a scrap of wings,

and within its reach and within sight,

something akin makes us die in fright.

 

And thus dead to the dead in love,

we learn how to stalk and track

signs of summons, striking steps,

training ears, schooling eyes.

 

For without the soul or love,

any art is but a hollow husk,

and the soul has something

 

of the sacred quiddity of art

which to be had must be tried,

used & coupled with one’s heart.

American Carnage (per Donald Trump’s First Inaugural Address)

 

Rusted-out factories became tombstones scattered

across the far stretches of the American nation;

and the crime and gangs and drugs go and march

stealing lives all the while the education system,

flush with cash, robs the youth of wisdom and souls.

La « poésie » brutaliste est à la fois grosse et grasse

 

“You did well to leave, Arthur Rimbaud!

… You were right to abandon the boulevard

of the lazybones, the taverns of pisse-lyres …

for the commerce of the cunning…”

René Char

 

Still in clothes they cloud themselves

like the women of the bygone past:

but would you say with me—how

but few still have a musician’s gift

 

to tell apart a fine and clear measure

from the fausses notes & which of them

one should or shouldn’t want to hitch?

Or is it because wholly line by line

 

that grew like well-off woman’s shopping list

poesy turned (after good old baroque clouds)

angels into maudits Cupidons et putti gras

 

que Saturne, « le Père », ne laisse pas dépasser

sa faux—then with no Heaven above or within

doomed to shrink—into Jimmy Riddle’s piss?