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They Shoot Poets, Don’t They?

We step into the lion’s cage without a whip,
The applause of the audience vociferous in its enthusiasm
For impending peril,
And we threaten the beast with words,
With a vocabulary of pejorative wit and cunning,
An expression of defiance, insolence, audacity,
An idiom of authority, lexis of steel,
Appearance of sages.
Beast of a thousand deaths, I shall not be the prey
Limp in the maw of your voracious unconcern.
Suddenly we come to realize
That the lion does not understand our language.

A whimsical wind blows the top of the tent
Clear into the distance
And we get a good look at the sky.
With a gasp and a whimper the circus is gone
And the arena is now the address
Of the world untamed,
Prone, lying in wait,
Licking its chops,
Growling its intentions.

There is an art in dying this way,
In this illusion of chaos;
Losing at horseshoes, winning at hand-grenades
And almost understanding the point.
There is only one aim in life and that is to live it.
Some will argue that there is no life without struggle,
As they stand in line to face the lions,
Armed with a smirk and a good-hearted fury.
But for others there is no question of struggle
Because there is no question of will;
Only an obedience
To flow
And wash up on the riverbank
Or mingle with the sewage
Or accept the mouth of the shark.

The culture we have adopted,
The culture we have modified,
The culture we have grown into
Is this one;
Everything for tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes.
Here is the present, and the present is a bridge,
And tomorrow we shall cross it.
None of these poor bastards ever think of blowing it up.

In this illusion of chaos we all sink into the cultural void.
We stand on five minutes and devour centuries
As the heroes kill themselves in broad daylight;
These martyrs of modern progress,
These poets of tawdry disposition,
Caked over like whores,
Humbled by the darkness of the human heart,
Incensed at the sponsorship of decency, goodness,
Profound emotive civility and integrity,
Banging our heads against walls
Hoping they will shatter.

Oh, but isn’t this America?
No, America doesn’t exist;
It’s a name that is given
To an abstract idea.
Paint, pen, lyric, sculpture—of the earth
And of the human, of the aesthetic
And the non-empirical, of the reality
And the fantasy, of the corporeal
And the mystical—expose us for what we are.
And if we are soggy dough, watered down yeast particles,
Art will make us bread,
Dipped into wine,
Inducer of song.

Dear reader, out of the cultural void,
Wherever there are individuals there are new frontiers.
The world problem, however, is the individual problem,
And the individual is the world problem.
People cry out for others to love them as they are,
Because they have a hard time loving themselves.
Love me for who I am, for I am a person of doubt,
I am a person of weakness, I am a person of solitude,
And I am afraid of the things I feel,
I am afraid of the world I see,
I am afraid of the change around me;
I am so beaten and trodden that kindness I cannot trust.
Myself I yearn to accept,
Myself I fail to accept;
Will you accept me?
Destroy your sense of God—the lion roars.

As poets we’re all failures.
As failures we’re all marvelous.
Poets celebrate the burning of libraries—
As with libraries, so with monuments;
As with monuments, so with civilization;
And without civilization there are no more poems left to write,
Thank god.
We’re all starving because no one is reading our work,
No one is buying our stuff anymore.
The typists have burned their fingertips with acid to avoid being printed,
The proofreaders have sewn their eyes shut,
The translators have cut out their tongues,
The editors conceal knives in their coats
And the publishers have all relinquished their badges.
We’re wandering the streets in rags, begging for coins and matches.
I prefer to be a poor man,
And god knows I’m poor.
All that’s left is to be a man.

They began to come after us,
Rounding us up in groups.
They wore sunglasses and an emblem (fifth sign of the zodiac),
Had revolvers in their waistlines and rifles in the trunks of their sports cars.
We heard a lot about contamination and amelioration;
There were arrests in the bazaars,
Gunfire in the plazas,
Midnight shredding sessions in the government buildings;
Some of us submitted, some of us were intercepted
At our walks by the river or picnicking in the park,
Some of us were handed over to the authorities by our peers;
Papers in order, documents in hand, some of us evacuated the sector
Before the insurgence began.

Some of us stuck it out,
Made our living doing The Business.
I tried it myself for a while.
The men in tailored suits come along,
Bid me to lift my skirt
And remove my chemise for them.
I’ve got a soul and a conscience, a sense of refinement;
That’s bad—in a whore.
And who wants a delicate whore?
There’s a reason they keep coming back:
We’ve got holes, voids,
And in them are the only places
We can experience life, joy and pleasure—
The used-up voids.
This is our virtue;
We are quite eloquent here.

The poets, dear reader, thought
They had something to say
About feelings; about love, life, happiness,
Anger, pain, resentment, solitude…
Oh, the artist is always alone, but
What we need is loneliness.
Loneliness to ponder our shame and despair
About our inability to love;
We who write of love lack much general experience.
But they haven’t come for that.
It’s not my ideas that they want,
Only my corpse.
And literature coming from the cold corpse
Of a whore
Is the last thing to be served in bed.

Just a warning to you, dear reader,
I hear they are setting up stings on the johns now
And burning them too.
They’re on to us, and they aim to incarcerate our associates.
There is no quarter held in the red light district
And a business transaction could mean your fate.

There are no ready-made infernos for the tortured.
We have to build our own.

All over the world their ideology is spreading:
Down in the basement of the Lubyanka they shot fifteen of us
For espionage and treason—crimes against the state.
They took Pasolini in Rome, Cabral in Guinea,
Milev in Bulgaria, Kasravi in Tehran,
Schulz in Drohobycz, Falkner in Mississippi,
Chaudhury in Bangladesh, Yuangyong on a trip to San Francisco,
Nabakov on a trip to Berlin,
The Adamsons, both in Kenya, nine years apart,
And even my good friend Lorca in Granada.

There was also Bodenheim,
Taken out in the Village by a sociopathic dishwasher;
Susan, who was bludgeoned to death
By a psychopathic dwarf—who was her son;
Sal by the pizza man in West Hollywood;
And the partisans that even shot down Luisa
In the streets of Milan, for being involved with a fascist;
Dino by the gangsters in Quebec;
Jackie by a jilted lover, Sonny Boy by a fatal mugging,
And Robert sang his strychnine whiskey blues;
Igor in Leningrad, Thekra in Egypt, Tosh in Jamaica—
His pal Bob went down in Miami but there’s still whispers and speculations;
In Los Angeles they got Dorothy with a shotgun,
Sam at the Hacienda and Marvin by his own father;
Even the crazed and demented supporters got Selena in Corpus Christi
And John at the Dakota in New York.

But then they got Mohandas in New Delhi,
And then Martin in Memphis,
And then Malcolm in Manhattan,
And then all hell broke loose.

It’s no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity.
It’s time to become a liar and a hypocrite to really discover
Anything tragic.
Let us not fool ourselves here—
It’s time to laugh at this catastrophe.
They’re trying to startle us out of our profound slumber;
The tragedy of the world is precisely
That nothing any longer is capable
Of rousing it from its lethargy.
Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips
And the blood of hope on my tongue.
I knew then
That in the name of art
They were coming for me next.

I’ve been the hero and the villain before;
At once I thought myself the villain because the heroes were uninspiring,
But then I thought myself the hero because the heroes were actually villains in disguise,
And then I knew myself the hero because the villains broke down their facades and wept,
But then I felt in my heart that I was the villain for I did nothing about it.
But now they don’t care, they just want to do me in for good.

I’ve cut my hippie hair, my rock and roll hair,
And I’ve shaved my face.
Hair grows back, but life doesn’t.
I’ve put on some gray clothes to go with the black.
Maybe that will disguise me enough for the time being.
I started talking to girls, employing kindness to my fellow human,
Walking my dog in public, donating to the needy.
I know it’s only a matter of time before they find me.
But I’ve got a card up my sleeve,
And perhaps even a monster for them.

I think I’m going to go where they will appreciate me,
And where I will be more comfortable:
A nice beachfront retreat in the gulf of Hell, overlooking the coast
From the gallows on the balcony of the penthouse suite
On the thirteenth floor,
Watching the faces of these poor souls contorted in sheer confusion
As they are ferried across the river.
It is there I may finally find a whip and a pistol and a smirk
And get back in line to face the lions.

But friends, dear readers, if they find you reading this just tell them
That you were using it to wipe the dirt from your shoe,
Or that it was in some language you did not understand,
Or that it was sent to you by accident.
Rest assured, friends, this is not a poem, and I am not a poet.
In fact, I did not even write this—this is just regurgitated Henry Miller
(Slightly salty, but delicious nonetheless).
They shot him long ago, but he survived. He survived and died
A natural death—the death of a non-poet.
Art is recyclable, and as artists we are all doing our part to save the planet.
Oh, but that slogan was rubbish.

I’m going to take that road that municipality forgot to pave where,
By good fortune, the shadows inhabit the dirt
And the sun neglects the Belladonnas and the Lily-of-the-Valleys,
And I’ll watch the clouds roll past the moon once more
In the bright midday sky.