By Aleksey Calvin
Saw you walking on the lamplight
In the corners of the moonlight's eye;
Such a statuesque ghost,
Rattling out explosive words,
The novae of blood
Like cold fire
Slowly dripping from the ceiling-sky,
Spelling out in the ashen air
Words of seething wisdom,
Cruel and bold.
And I speak to this ghost on parole,
Questioning, chanting: "Oh, angel of night,
Of sleepless 3AM dreams,
Oh, angel of "feel all right",
Our good old man of parallel freedoms...
Well, could you tell us now?
Do you finally know?
And if you have seen it, can you show?
Through the rattle of rain
And the crackle of typewriter keys.
If it’s only a trick of the Brain,
Or whether it’s really all the same?"
(Do you only come and go in and out a world - a word - never changing?
A most mechanic masturbator, our mask of thought become milky source;
In solitude reaping and wailing, benignly falling on one's own sword.
Or do you, even as we speak, get your kicks
Hovering above locker rooms
Full of naked Adonis kids?
- Forever high on the most heavenly junk?
Yours was the last artifact of squeezed out prose,
The last reflection from the final years of a wet tongue,
Before it dried up: plasti-glass and hollow typed letters.
And our dreamy troglodytes born tongue-less, in envy or shame,
Between coughs claimed how all you got to know is some sepulchral meditations,
Made of no deep blood, no juicy passions,
Just routines of a deviant Chekhov stuck on some perfect ketamine
Again and again.
But we, we sure remember you well,
Your words were like a casket for the industrial dream.
And you were the Priest.
You left us mental bombs, guides to self-pleasure, fingers a'flutter,
Honest face enjoying a silent ecstasy, sans smile, and all-the-while
Seething in a squinting misanthropy for the marionette galore
For all but for the world's hidden Johnsons:
The benevolent artful dodgers nicking golden refuse bowls
From some fat poison-blooded rat scheming fascist takeovers atop a throne of silken pillows
In a congressman's mask
Quite harmless really, besides the billion dollar thunder-spells, the patriotic libel, and children's armies
At the drop of the hat
The massive monster's just a pet of another
An evil in the bright blue air, or a cat's nightmare, a cloud of dirty thought pouncing
Repeating its name, and the name is evil, evil that does exist as money and pain,
With its real arms squeezing obscure authors into salty pulp and its real face
Still as the heart of void, but for the very real mouth,
Is matched only by the mouth of the rat,
The mouth, a rusty sieve, ancient, never enough to eat, never enough to eat,
And all the spirit-food right into a tube
(A schoolboy forever laments "my work, my sex, and all junk of Eden!
All slips away into the slimy dark!)
To an expanding belly, a black hole, but just as well a criminal bank
Making an undead living to turn all yur romantic gifts to a fleshless dance of loveless calculations,
As supernova shrapnel shots, the hazard never accidental,
As intentional as rot.
You would say "murder deserves a most noble castigation",
While staring out of window into sun-splattered springtime chaos,
The criminality of weeds in a white-fenced garden plot.
You amidst the cavalcade of knife-sharp minutes, exploding into age as paint-bombs,
All has been decided and all can be known,
Sneaking your pen
And those ever-rediscovered slow machine guns of stories we value (particularly the signed copies)
Inside of some manifest Aether: could that be the final sound?
Oh, stern prophet, that’s what you wanted.
Some true Voice from the bowels, maybe the heart, of the city
Sleeping like a baby.
And pulling blood from the ground.
So, tell us, can we really shoot out stars
While drawing bruises on the arms of our blissful hours?
Would burning even a thousand crosses
Start up a revolutionary process?
Or a process of a Real Man’s springtime,
A real man: what a thought!..
Cartoon of a cartoon,
Always composed and stiff in any social or physical clime…
But you’re better than that, oh closet angel,
You old tart, mummified in spider-webs of legends of success
And clichéd, but still startling, revelations of heart
In your deathbed.
And in life maybe half-manifest always leaving, a
A familiar memory of a man walking and breathing,
Inscrutable, above all a model, and not just for the raw and the tall,
But who cares that on Thanksgiving you emit a wail like a banshee maid,
As that storied redstinger pierces your placenta and caresses your balls
And who cares what you were,
Whether a classic air traveler, an unfaggy homosexual, a quite gun, a magician, mortician, or a goddamn undead nun.
When even in death you somehow manage to resist the clutches of techno
Priests, soulless capitalists,
All the cancerous walking anachronisms
You nodded out nobly, gracefully,
And they thought,
Okay, well maybe now we can make a buck from this roughshod flood
(Like they did with Ginsburg and Kerouac…)
But whenever they try to use your work in some Unholy Walmart spell,
Your eyes would dart to their necks like Mack’s knives,
Promising to slash their entrails out in front of their families,
And they’d hear your voice haunting them all to go to hell.
You were the one who didn’t cop out, you learned the game all the way and glared up at the magicians of Madison avenue in their glass houses
The bastards
Who have planted grains of complacency in the fertile TV soil,
Who send commands our worlds over in the form of money so there’s no Choice,
Who have put an end to history,
Who terrorized, converted and conscripted all the old heroes, or killed them And stole their names, learned to speak in their voices,
But not in yours.
And you knew you had that going for you,
So for a while you were relentless,
Building up words to become hard and strong enough to be stuck in-Between the cogs and the gears, to rape the rapist in their own game.
To initiate a new kind of resistance, a conscious empowerment of ideas, The new science of turning words from air to metal,
More than literature, more than politics, more than a person’s mind,
But something that may rain down as a wall of daggers
And only upon the ones who had it coming.
The ones who have the guns, the tanks, the bomb,
But with our simply entertaining the notion,
The king is naked in a flash,
All the young soldiers are laughing and fucking.
But you couldn’t ever lead, or walk beside the crowd or even times,
Always did walk alone, back and forth,
Or you’d sit and stare the wall or at your toes,
Not hiding, but in stillness learning to move
I know your black-burn form of passivity so well,
And, call me naïve, but maybe paralysis invites movement…
And at times solitude does breed compassion…
Just one question remains:
You wrote your way out of a coma, sure,
But how the hell did you become so well-respected?
Perhaps because You’ve given us the recipe to broil our
Dreams and truly make ‘em news!
And some of us will nevermore forget
Those sunburst visions of society’s cancers.
As we smoke our way into the proud Shakespeare Battalion...;
Learning to search for Prophecy amidst refuse,
And poetry in guts and blood
Focusing our eyes onto today’s yearning
Viruses of choice
And seeing conspiracies where they surely are
Your Sprit, breathing Still silkily stalks
The tangled avenues of a child planet,
Like time itself, raspily talking
And I know, that it wasn’t all a bunch of one-shot kills
Sometimes you were just reeling, or vomiting, Sometimes joking.
But as we stole your books from big brans stores
And read you in the civility of suburbs, we asked,
If it really was such an obscene feeling.
And at best, you remind us not to flee, but to face the pricks
At our own terms
So I wouldn’t be surprised
If mad young drunks still sometimes glimpse you in the cities
Stalking cold alleys in the fog like a perfect picture of a noir-dream
One could hardly call you unassuming
And we on earth,
Under a paling future appearing ghostlier than you,
How can we stand still, must we not go further?!
Armed with delirious hopes and a skin of old pages,
We must get up from our armchairs, step out from behind the counters,
And march ahead
- Through a greying choking world -
March along
With a stare of centuries
And slap a guileless status quo, slap it hard!
Tear at its seams, brandish our knives,
Sever power lines, produce great acts of revenge
And all our literatures must become epitaphs for bastards,
And our poems must be visions like swords,
To show up the brainless pawns,
To take us boldly gliding on the steel rain from blue Saturday mornings,
Through chemical fogs and cardboard institutions,
And finally to the base of the land’s tallest skyscraper,
Where we would climb the fire escape into the occupied Vichy heavens,
And catch the neurotic oil barons, the kings of spirit’s Assassins,
The damn media-empire Wizards of Oz in their vilest acts,
As they come up with poisonous facts to feed the starving, and sweet lies, toxic cheap liquors,
To drown the gullible thirsty drunks with as payment for an eternal purgatory overtime.
Those sadistic Rotting octopi out of an ancient putrid swamp,
Whose slimy tentacles don't even sprawl that far, but
It’s such a long fall down,
And no amount of money would cushion the ground…
And you’d say, a perfect voice from the grave,
You'd say and it would be the only sound,
You'd say and say, when one just has to say it out loud,
The only voice in a crowd, not loud, talking alone,
You'd say
About time, our time,
And you’d say “About time”.