Dead Men

Dead are the sleeping men,

Dead by their marching drone.

Awakened bare by a bare word--

As a bare Fruit of a seasonal branch

Bare of it's yellow leaves--

Bare is the shrilling word

Of Death, frozen silent on the wind;

(Lucid men sing of dreams,

Sleepers dream of singing;

Lo, Dead Men do not dream at all,

Nor sing within dreams for it cuts their tongue.)

Wild-eyed, bare sabres, land

On bosoms made from Lust,

Glint Silver in a wistful hand:

"Make ready the cannon!"

Cries the Noblest of Muck,

Scrounge to face'em when rest'him dies:

A trial gun and the saving crumbs pluck,

And the naked ape sighs

On the World's crank, "Yo! Ho!"

As the call of Death wakes the cock.

Economic cannons

Blast brigades of Dead Men,

As a sabre splays reddened mead

From a grayish globe spurting steam, laying

Dreamers beneath as seed;

Scythed weeds for a crooning plot,

Though, Dead Mean sing no Songs:

…And the dead men are the lost men;

The working men of Nature's slumber;

These irate men with pirate gin

Grow cold in their waste and plunder.

But with a wistful grin and wishful eye

They throe and take for Pride,

And the wistful cringe is a fleeting Sin

Upon the beggar who's ready to die...

But dead are the sleeping

Men; heaving more debt for bread.

Their scaly yearns as sorrow's clash

Dismay; lost by lows of a deeper rung,

And with a croaking lung

On an awkward bier,

They speak, "Silence," and no one hears.

With a dying tongue they speak their greatest word;

Of Dead Men dying, no one's ever heard.

Sometimes a red-garden grows

Sometimes the moment lies

And sometimes with lament' eyes;

Sometimes a wolf bears its teeth

And a fire’s like a romance be.

Sometimes these moments cast away

That time so catches life to say,

Sometimes love's rosebuds do not grow

For lovely rose seedlings grew too slow.

For love like growing roses rest,

In chlorine and sometimes zest,

These reddened shapes seduced and sexed

As morphine and most-times vexed!

Oh, my love by sweet garden’s light,

Thou but hold this stem e’en by fright,

That livened stamens rise to treat,

Thy inner pistil as thighs unmeet.

And dost thou gentle fires burn,

Alas! Fresh that sponge red-fluids churn,

‘gainst ravish, that thou may not begat,

Permit this throb betwixt our love’s contract.

Sometimes the moment truthful dies,

And sometimes with whitened lies,

Sometimes a leopard rears a beast,

And through the mud for one at least.

Sometimes a red-garden grows,

But youth passes too swiftly too denote

Thy beauty’s spring-shape into autumn,

For love grows sometimes in the bottom.

Lip-String

There is a stretching from lip to a lip

Like a rope-bridge from the hearts to the hip,

And swings of the weight from spirit to limb;

That betroths the love-drip, a lip to a lip.

To hold such a Peach to the teeth and rim,

For the gushing o’ flavors abreast to stem—

The golden ravishing of the limbs to feet;

For the long-hour comes a moment too grim.

The tight-ropes to those bridges compete,

As the blood in flourishing stands complete.

That Love ne’er tends to know of the living,

For one must in his heart of lusting deplete.

Oh! Gentle caress o’ her silver lip-string,

And mine eye so closed, now of all seeing,

The sal’vation on Her softened lips state—

Doth twine with mine own spi't and wellbeing:

"Love-knot of Our lip-string like threads of the Fates

Through fickle, shall tie Us together through Hate."

The Mad Satyr

I wrote this because

I forgot that it didn’t matter;

That I wrote this to destroy

The unanimous spatter,

The clatter, and battered,

For the batch of mediocrity

I choose to shatter

And tear to tatters.

Mad, mad, mad, mad-hatters

Might think me a bit madder,

From the height I blabber

To the depths from a ladder

Borne from entrails of the nagger

And it’s nagging.

I wrote this to fill a void,

A blank page too much destroys,

Like Death’s silence louder than noise.

Have you dyed the coffin splatter

Black with the make-up platter?

Are you too shook-up to look up

From the words and page-up

To the definition, a fuck-up

With the red squiggle;

Is your page filled-up…

Yet?

Have you crushed the norm,

So it clutches the morn,

Enticing the storm,

And the Dawn borne

to night too close to the morn-

-ing star?

Be warned…

I wrote this page as a mentalist;

Fundamental and existential;

Archaic damnation on a scroll

Too quick before the Act, and the troll

Beneath your bridge

Rewrote this page

To near the ending of Earth’s menstrual

Cycle, bleeding from its Magna Carta

Clam; seeding new life, Constitution-ally

Devoid of righteous seething,

Breathing out, exhaling gold dust

For oxidized iron manacles;

Dig on X the skin-map says:

On the mark painted bright

By a stale breeze of the laughing drunk,

Told by the Miller daft before a Knight;

Calm by the fire, forged to quill-pen writing,

From third-word tongue and two-cent

Lung, equivalent solidity

Of cigar smoke rising from the lips,

Warmed by improvisations that

Black-balled humanity far from the oyster’s

Pearl just around the corner, how Sailors

Think in secret and in push, to whaler-

Obsessions and those great white collar

Delusions of happier finds,

From a polymer moral to the plastic

Conclusion; pewter as silver,

And silver are all dreams buried

Tarnished and decomposing.

Dig on the X the Earth-map says:

Can you dig?

Can you dig?

Or is the shade to dark

For the growing tree’s bark;

Stark in the plight,

And a lark blots the Sun.

Where did it go—Life—?

You dug to long;

Low, but not deep enough

And blotted out the Sun!

There is no treasure left,

There’s no pleasure left,

There is no measure left,

Or cleft notations to subjugate

The silence left

When the Music quit ringing,

And now the mind is reeling,

For reality and death grows

Closure and out of Nothing

Grew lament for a living Done;

What’s left of you, what's left of Man,

What’s left of All when you blot out the Sun?

I wrote this to interrupt a page,

To disrupt perfection and mock

Its colonic indifference:

The Mad Satyr, sings for his fare,

His wage for a boat ride’s sage,

To pass the journey’s foreboding way,

Oh Fate; that delivered the Great Papyrus,

I give it back for the Fire, and the Pain,

For the wretched and depraved,

For the purity, the knave and the fits—

I interrupted God once…

When I shattered the clay pot,

He could never fix.

The Day of The Drone

This Day is growing for the serving drones;

The time of empty homes and worry stones.

Apollo’s ember now burns here colder,

Ragged by Hephaestus’ icy hammer

Humanity’s renowned virtue belies Hope,

Vanity, ousted by a crueler note.

Rung from the un-tuned Bell Tower,

And hung from gallows in the Arty Bower!

Death’s gentle irony affixed pleasure—

Let the Meek take the lead measure;

The hive is ridden of plastic followers,

The Queen has died; the nest is hollow-er.

I Recompense

I reciprocate with recompense

Your racial tone and free two cents,

With idle hands and pallor skin—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense for being trite

For all your Hate and all my plight;

To do a job and do it right—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense my German-look,

The Dutch last name my Fathers took,

My bloody hands your Devil shook—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense entitlement,

Reparations from the Government;

My entire life in sufferin’—

I recompense, I recompense.

I reckon Hell and reel your slack,

As sweat and Pain run down my back,

Pardon me for what I lack—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense the Crumbs you drop,

Your Crystal Stair that I ain’t got;

To feed, as you just waste a Crop—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense the Laws you bent,

My tired back, my angry vent;

I’m held like you between Their splint—

I recompense, I recompense.

I recompense for being White,

‘Take care of me, no room for I.”

You can’t tolerate my Bitch and gripe;

I recompense…

I recompense this dirty glass,

This depleting drink, the worthless Flask,

This worn-out speech, your tit-for-tat,

I recompense…

I recompense your money stack,

Your racial brand across my back

Fuckin’ A’ that’s where it’s at

This recompense; my recompense.

Amethyst Grave

Her Moonstone Jewel shined nothing like the Sun;

Festoon'd remembrance as the maidens reap-

Cool Jade mind-struck, her ghastly pen did stun,

And pricked my awful finger’s ancient leap.

Mauve—betwixt the Flower’s idle stemming,

I beheld what thieving gems did lie with aim!

And stayed before Time had found me swimming,

About Her stolen pendant all the same:

I said, “it’ll sleep,” anon dying mem’ry,

That hast swooned what Life the Mirror bade;

Beyond my reminiscent Ministry,

I’d betrothed her mourning, amethyst grave!