Tag: literature

To Ezra Pound

Were you to have seen the ovens
your hard tongue would have burned to ash,
you devil, lecturing covens
as the fulgurous blitzkriegs flash.
Across your adopted homeland
you exulted while others warred,
having no honor, a Roman
who would not fall upon his sword,
even after his unjust wrath
had been thwarted by apt measure
like Commodus slain in his bath,
a tyrant cleaved to his pleasure.
What good songs you sang are lost,
deafened by your erudite cries
of hatred, bigotry—mind lost
in rooms padded with your own lies.
The lunatics sang behind you,
electroshock troopers plugged in,
the asylum leader in view,
his thunderclap voice a loud din
that quickened Europe’s stagnant blood
and swept you across the ocean,
your own heart racing forth, aflood
with a Modernist’s crass notion
about “betterment”, “perfection”,
Aryan teleologies,
the irony of your lection
being bad Aristophanes.
Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and others
embosomed you with their regard,
sympathetic to such brothers
who despised those whom were ill-Starred
and though I might forgive them such
as was wont in that insane age,
you, villain, were not half so much
repentant on your prideful stage.
Some claim you recanted your songs
so thunderous with cannon force,
but even if true, how can wrongs,
once done, not continue their course?
They are as birds within a cage
set free, their talons stretched apart
to clutch the world with a sharp rage;
thunderbolts thrown into the heart.
You cannot outrace the echoes
that fly away from bygone words,
no more than may a weed beck those
seeds carried far by passing birds,
or passing storms, or fell ages,
the seeds sprouting roots and shoots far
and blooming fast, necrophages
of blood and soil spilled from a Star.

Bridlepath

Thunderous the too-distant hooves
along the softened bridlepath,
countless the many horseshoe grooves
in the twilight, the aftermath,
and half-awake I but wander
that sylvan lane wherethrough may pass
dreams aplenty over yonder—
a pilgrimage, a dusk-flown Mass.

Happy Hollow Road (My Old KY Home Parody)

O, the moonshine’s bright
over Happy Hollow Road,
Tis nighttime,
the locals are drunk.
Well, the locals fight
cuz their guts squirm like a toad
while bourbon makes them sick
like a skunk.

Sleep no more, dear neighbor,
oh sleep no more tonight.
We throw down loud
for Happy Hollow Road,
for Happy Hollow Road,
we oft fight.

Well, the drunk folks hurl
all over the outhouse door.
They’re angry, all
squirrelly and crazed.
Bend over for moontide
and fall flopping on the floor,
piss where they all may lay,
drunk and dazed.

Ambition

I was as the candle quite bright
in the corner, amidst cobwebs,
aflame, yet misplaced in the night;
alike tallow as its glob ebbs.

My tallow dribbled down to aught,
the flame fed by a finite host,
burning the wick away to naught—
no more, now, than a smoky ghost.

The bright light I gave was unseen,
lit only in neglected nooks,
and though I burned both bright and keen,
I commanded no second looks.

Forgotten, forlorn, extinguished,
a puddle lax in the drip pan,
melted by the ambitions wished
to be illumed within my span.

Yet, I burned nonetheless…so bright,
if only for sake of burning,
giving it my all for a light
meaningless in toil and learning.

Blurbs

You scratch my
hardback,
I’ll scratch yours,
maybe even skim it,
so long as my commission
is paid in turn.
Blurb for a blurb
is the going rate in this
circlejerk of authors who are
corralled like livestock
by the stud-farm publishers.
Like the Art world
where galleries stoke the value
of a few select artists
so those premiere galleries can
cash in on their
rigged insider trading,
so, too, authors
are pressed to praise
what does not impress
as it goes to the presses.
What goes around
comes around
in a marketplace of
praise-prospectors.
And the blurbs are hyperbole
taken to such a degree
as if to be a secret signal
or warning
through unintentional satire.
“This generation’s War And Peace.”
“Would unnerve Bram Stoker.”
“I could not put it down, yet was fearful
of the next word.”
“Love In The Time Of Cholera
meets The Idiot by way of
Rudyard Kipling.”
“Kaleidoscopic usage of adverbs.”
“Will affirm all the worthwhile things
in life, awakening the heart of the reader
one page at a time.”
There is no difference
between sleeve jacket hymns
and porn-parody except
one is sleeved in plastic
and the other in latex.
It is MLM levels of
hype, the hyper hype
done with a strained smile
bordering on a psychotic breakdown.
The books may have spines,
but the authors don’t,
or perhaps they have no taste,
only a hunger for exposure,
even if it is exposure as a
fraud.
Or perhaps in this
dog-eat-dogshit world
it is better to swallow one’s pride
and expel a hairball blurb
than be choked to silence
when publishers refuse
to groom your works, works
lost in the multitudes of
showdogs
willing to sell their souls
one blurb at a time
for a blurb of their own.
It is a game
full of winking,
but you must never blink.
It is a farce of superstition,
yet you must believe.
Blurbs are the
conman’s currency, the
conman’s creed, the
conman’s rites,
the concentrated extracts of reviews
slavish to the publishing companies,
and, if you don’t mind,
please compare my book to Dickens
as I would like to evoke his everyday whimsy when readers read the blurb on the back of my book. I, in turn, will compare your book to Shirley Jackson so as to resonate with lovers of gothic literature, even if your pastiche of her work is diluted and amateurish to the point of absurdity…

Horror Writer

A monarch of nightmares,
a scribe of grotesque tales,
searching through limbic lairs
and various pits and hells
to find the dreamscapes deep
in the strange hearts of men,
like one who cannot sleep
except with eyes open,
mapping the world’s shadows
with a typewriter’s keys
to illuminate those
fears, those territories
of the soul and the mind
which, in ancient times past,
spurred men to glance behind,
not knowing if, at last,
that lurker had now sprung
to pounce atop its prey
and lick with a cold tongue
the spine, without allay,
to shiver the great ape,
to remind him of his fate,
of death without escape
and the hour…growing late.