I'm sure everyone is trying to act sprightly right now, so we can't have Wyatt as our latest in artistic decoration. Instead, here's a re-worked form of an earlier poem.
/scar
0.
Near a night-club,
The way the stars were,
and the palm trees sketching outlines along their spectre,
was almost
a song over
the people's loud blare of noise.
**
the plait of flat lights in the sky
was an illumination,
a painting.
**
The people did not stir,
but kept hopefully to their dance
like uncivilized barbarians beneath the Pax Romana
of the constellations
**
meaning removed for dance beats,
hollowed,
and this dance was their only heartfelt art.
They were like savages, or proleterians,
men without culture.
**
Meanwhile in the church a block away,
a quaint evening’s chorus
was made of plain choirboys
with nothing to say, but singing
as if they cared about what they said,
because they had been trained to sing this way.
For they praised God,
but only looked to the crowd.
One might think them deceptive.
The exultantly ordinary laity never would.
Some people would be bored when you first
asked why Christmas is a commercial scheme,
or why Valentine's Day celebrates fornication,
or why they pray when God would hate them.
**
the stars sung something like, 'Holy, Holy, Holy,'
starlit trees absorbed their light near the street,
hanging across the pavement staring apart, beneath the moon.
The stars had a music of their own,
quite different from that of the others,
yet it was no pop music,
and it was no classical music,
it was real.
The light of
Valentine’s Day moons is like a strange ode,
where the day's halo rings on indefinitely
after the clock strikes, for the night is
all its denizens care for. The moon as if to say,
“Is it a chore of constancy, or the rush
for love without a face? The beauty of night
shall not shine tonight.”
And so it never did.
There was no such special night.
It was a forgery.
And there were no stars, either, not
even of the vulgar, celebrity kind.
The only truth was in the music of stars and of the spheres
that stared at them as out of a window,
But in capital, ordinarily, people moved closer
to capital, and thus attained some modest success,
that was enough to placate them,
and anything else was alternative, detached and rude.
The way past the open gazes
led to a secluded lilt of leaves and sky,
almost transmuted
seen at night.
We may hold the world to account if they did not listen.
Yet perhaps the moonlight sings, far away.
2. Half-light
Quiet oaks
of a Swindonian garden might render
in opal when in focus, yet
the sky still reflects itself in a distant pond.
The sun is a shadowed eye.
It is silent. It is like abandoned factories,
which call out, ghost-like, in a dour town,
as if to display a way out of this.
3. Creep Song.
Wait! Is there a sweeter slumber in the grave below,
or in the light of thine eyes? Mistress, tell me,
I need to know. Somebody told me. If I were
more perjured I should cry, ‘Calumny!’ and
no doubt be met with sympathy. What, then,
should leave your creep so isolated and serious?
For Hoxha is oft hated, I have seen in most encounters,
I have had with those who were not creeps,
And if I were to hope with a hope
that formed bunkers, would I not
then be called rogue? Aye, this occupies me.
But what else occupies me? Well, the Bible and God.
I am alike all of my kind,
a kin to all of my cause.
When people
decried Tarquin's treatment of Lucrece, then truly
could I say, “I have found an ally," for Tarquin is on my side.
Yet am I not the victim of a label? Fie, fie,
it is victim blaming, to hold against this creep
the rape culture of an age, which admittedly
might just involve me. Why should the world
conspire to separate me from the object of my desire,
what gives it the right?
In this way creeps are like all subversives.
For a million voices cry out that I have raped them,
and I have only raped half,
and they deserved it.
Shall I not be forgiven my iniquities?
For they are venial, in the light of the sins
of those who have perjured me,
who have sought to place obstacles in the way of my conquests,
who have hated me beyond all reason.
I shall be vindicated in the end.
**
A narrow path
would not have looked good on a priest’s
credit card.
If drugs are a function of peer pressure,
then they're just a part of conformity.
Brooding,
half-realised shapes - hopes for escape - were strewn on the walls
of the no-doubt asylum where a creep grows up,
condemned there for punishment.
So we are circled around,
by wardens in many shapes and sizes,
teachers or feminists,
all these are the same.
Romance is a mere tryst,
it is not to truly possess your beloved
if you meekly wait for their assent.
Trysts are made on a whim, and have no substance. To be a creep is to be revolutionary.
4. Year Zero. (ZeroNowhere.)
What need have we for the sound
of exciting words, lacking content?
Our words must hang like silence, in darkness:
mysterious and obscure, yet sublime.
Like the stillness of long-empty hallways, and quiet speculation,
socialism is most certain in silent contemplation.
5. Savage (unedited.)
The promises of
yesterday are like a glassed-off
garden’s grey shadow.
If you wish, you may
never be seen again, but shush
before you’re tortured.
It is a brief note
that the day is wan or in spring,
but a quiet gaze.
