Zuckerberg, trying to make a case that his banning of my poetry blog for life is highly patriotic and American

 

Baudelaire in the Underworld

 

The sensual, but sans the usual fluff,

may flow in love made to slow

the dash of time to what is bound 

to abide, bidding adieu to everything 

that wouldn't stand what beauty brings

from within one's till now sleepig heart,

suddenly filled like a flower, crowning grass,

in the glory of becoming a new living light.

The sand of moribund and fevered senses,

dusting off once majestic and regal mountains

bruised by cutting storms and countless winds,

builds in vain its way too early shapless castles

by the shores of ancient seas which can never mind

the horrid, screechy howling of the forlorn soul

which its merchants exchanged for a hollow image

on the caving wall that grinds her eye to grime and smut.

A Platonist’s Requiem for the USSR and Hymn for the American Dream

 

How, in truth, could there ever be a perfect, just,

and beautiful Union between soulless mates?

 

“Expropriators of the souls, unite with the soulless!”

was the barbarians’ battle cry.

 

“It’s the economy, stupid!”

 

It did not take the materialists in charge of the socialist countries

that long to figure out that, in principle, nothing did or should

prevent them from turning the vast material assets of the socialist state

and nation into their own material wealth. From the material

and materialistic point of view, their decision and calculus

were impeccable. Primitive accumulation and new neo-feudal

primitivism based on the most cynical theft and betrayal was a go.

 

Both the US and the USSR

                        or the Soviet Union

            loved to sing

                                    and preach and be

of the perfect,

                        lasting Union

                                    on earth under Heaven

            of the perfect, splendid, happy communion

that transforms whoever enters

                        into its pot, mouth, or cauldron—

            magical keyhole,

                                    shaped up like a dream,

the chalice brimming with

                                    alchemic wine—

into the best one can be,

                                    the best ecstatic lover,

            the best soldier,

                                    the best astronaut,

                        or a new Zatopek

who ties up almost any distance

            like a piece of art

made of the body

and the human spirit

            as far as to the mortals            Gods allow

and by which space and time,

            fabulously twanged and rippled,

 

could in awe                begin anew.

 

But with whom?        

Oh, with whom?

With whom and how?

 

Both the US and the Soviet Union

used to woo and teach

of the perfect,

                        lasting Union

of love, happiness, and bliss

that would come

to anyone who who’d come and join.

 

Until suddenly, or was it slowly,

                                    a slow numbing & killing off

                        of its heart and soul,

each of them denied

                        and denied their own and to be one’s own,

the Soviet Union wasn’t,

                                    wasn’t that one promised Union

            or any other

                                                anymore.

Unloved & unloving,

                        abandoned,

                                    having abandoned

            its own soul

                        which its doctrine didn’t

allow to exist in the least.

 

Can they—could they ever care—

for what they’d done away with?

 

“What matters,” these new lovers,

these new unconscious, yet epigonic Lysiai,

would preach on behalf of the new Utopia,

whether now or in the end,

            if nothing is

                                    and nothing matters if it’s not

                        not more,

            not more

than matter,

                        matter soulless

and thus matter dead,

which means that all that’s human & live

dies anyway,

 

                        becoming nothing,      senseless nothing

where all must for any human end?”

 

            How could such a Union last?

 

            How could a union of soulless lovers last?

 

            How much for a soul?

 

            But whatever is paid, it’s always a fraud,

            always way too little

                        for what it is priceless

            as nothing else could ever match

            its birthright, cost and worth.

 

For it’s written: you may denigrate, disown and deny your soul,

                        even as if without selling her out,

                                    to the devil or any other bidder or buyer,

just by laying her aside forsaken by the road

                        for the first random thief to carry off your treasure,

but you cannot do that

                                                with no fatal harm or loss to yourself

                        or to anything you may ever try

and without grossly denigrating yourself

and thus others too

                                    and without deep down disowning yourself

either soon or only a bit later.

 

But always mortally and deeply.

 

For no flower can grow and bloom

if its roots are cut or mutilated

            as when a teaching of death ousts the songs of souls.

 

Platonic Meditation on Time, Odysseus, and Ferlinghetti

 

“They are really fascist forms of underground government

making people believe something but the truth.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Underwear, Starting from San Francisco, 1961

 

“Time drops to the ground

like a shadow from a tree,”

wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti

and I write now in the wake

of his passing on February 22, 2021,

less than a month to his 102^nd birthday.

 

And if time from which Ferlinghetti himself

just ran out is a like a shadow from a tree,

why don’t we see that mighty divine tree

under which, in the hues and darks,

we, mortals, live, passing one another

to and from acts and moments

 

as if we too were of the sightless shades?

But then Ferlinghetti went to say

that the eternal tree had been cut down

“by an unknown carpenter beyond the sea”

who thus could be Jesus or Set, the One

Who Made a Coffin for His Brother Osiris,

 

the God of the Dead, the Egyptian Dionysus,

cut to pieces and then collected by Isis

except for the one small, devoured piece

that she needed to replace with a stand-in

to become pregnant in a new and totally

unprecedented, immaculate precedent and way

 

by this Sun who moved for good to the other world.

But how many know or would suspect how much

of Egyptian there is deep down in American woman

unless you do truly walk one day across the compound

of Rosicrucian Park with the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum,

the Rosicrucian Labyrinth, Alchemy Exhibit and Garden,

 

and the Rosicrucian Temple in San Jose in the Silicon Valley?

But Ferlinghetti, this new American-Italian prophet

of the new American city and its underground truths

also added (in the same piece) that the tree (the coffin)

was made into our boats that swing between poetry and sex,

making it hard for the souls thus carried to see the Hell of this world.

 

Yet elsewhere, while still alive, he asked this: “Do the dead

know what time it is?” Are the dead, indeed, still concerned

about the shades out of which Eternity, branching out

through all that is, makes time and its ceaseless change?

But Death, whether Osiris, Jesus, the carpenter, or Set or Saturn,

surely must pay attention to the living shades and time

 

for it (or they?) must always be on time, knowing when

to strike and when to collect and when to move like a Charon

all who need to cross and be transferred either to the VIP Bliss Club

or to the pledged eternal torture chambers of sadistic and fascist Satans

of which the generous Churches kindly tell tales even to the little ones.

Only the most depraved can attach to the immortality of the soul

 

and thus her divinity and goodness such a lie of her eternal evil,

infinite cruelty, continuing destruction, and complete separation

from her godly self, leaving of the soul and time not more

than hollow husks, empty shades, the waste of cast-off scales

of the Cosmic Dragon and the Phoenix, the breathing Tree

of the Illuminated Universe, the rot of her deadened leaves.

 

But elsewhere still, even on the slab in Jack Kerouac Alley,

next to his City Lights Bookstore Ferlinghetti also says

that poetry too is but a shadow: “Poetry is the shadow

cast by our streetlight imaginations.” Do we live just

in the shades by the shades as shades—shades of the dead

prematurely, already, and thus terminally always

 

in a world where the soul and life itself became an outside

lonely lamppost on a street of a modern inflamed city?

Or can one somehow still collect from the shade the light,

its source, its own golden fountain if, to that shade, the soul

is and remains no more than only—a shadow of the very soul?

And so Odysseus too, having stolen the dildo or “the bone”

or, as the literati call it, the Palladium of Greek Isis,

 

the Great Goddess, from Troy, went on to disseminate

a gash, a rupture—new orders and new times—some of the last

bold mingling and mixing between the gods and the mortals,

brandishing the sculpted member—the key to Empire and power,

as his Golden Bough that buys both free entry to and free exit

from Hades and Hell, all the while, along with shrewd Homer,

 

making sure to call it as Cyclopes’ Nobody for the vulgar and profane

either an “oar” or a “fan” or a “stern” to which, for Sirens, he was tied.

And all this just to plant himself on countless daughters of the Sun

and other foreign Gods on his way, thus preparing his progeny

of Latinus, Italus, Romos, Anteias, Ardeias, the rulers over the Etruscans,

for Aeneas and for the rise of Rome, blending the genes of Gods

 

with the two mutually hostile bloods of Greeks and Asiatic Trojans

while making even his lovers and wives, according to the records,

unsure and confused which of his sons was born with whom

and which of them each was then to marry and have in turn,

thus turning also all the Penelopes, Calypsos, Circes as if into one.

And yet, all this time of trying and tasting all these foreign sprites

 

on his epic, roundabout, and scenic way back home, the deadly rage

and hate worthy of a devil true from Hell never ever left him,

madly gnawing on all his intestines, against all the other suitors,

all his other stand-ins, and for the other living sons of his war

companions who all perished on his ships when coming home,

those whom his Penelope kept and entertained in her court

 

as her “darling ducks” who couldn’t resist her cooing spells.

And then all this under many spinning lies of sly and wily

Odysseus and Homer to make the many idolize

and sympathize with the greedy and pitiless tyrant

who does not want to let others live, not even

Penelope’s female slaves whom he coldly strangles.

 

By character and by design it then became hard

to disentangle chaff from the seeds and

the shadows on that hollow’s walls

from the light that makes us grow

and leads us up and forward

except for the one morale:

 

to found and seed such an Empire

one has to try to get some Goddess

into bed before she turns

him briskly back into swine.

Such is then the key privileged,

Empire’s great mystery, conundrum.

 

And for this the chosen aspirant

must bring this Great Goddess, the Queen of Death

along some bough or bone, carved by a forked lightning

or by stealth or by war or some plague-ridden crime

bearing on a kind of death— “souls” already spoiled,

and maimed, disfigured, defaced, displaced, marred

 

so that there would be no longer any Tree,

just the refuse down to remain and stay,

after peeling off the light, peeling it off the mind and human heart,

impregnated with the plague, the disease, and so leaving

only the one downward, nether way to the caught & condemned.

But I am just one solitary Platonic grinding my little warbling tune

 

like an ax by the shore of the ancient Crooked River

that changed and reversed her winding course

through the labyrinthine flow of rushing time

in the way in which words bolt to a folded verse

as if trying to fly from its end back

where lies its holy source.