The Spirit of the Internet Weekly

Some interesting poems have been circulating on the Internet lately.
Here are some examples.
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THE WORLD AS HORROR HOLOGRAM VIEWED FROM A ZIPPY'S CELL
Proud and paranoid superpowers stumbling as to war, Presidents' wives getting pally
Popes and saintly bureaucrats fumbling in the dark
Those with the strength look up from Desolation Alley
Where the Holy Fools and HIV carriers have been banished from the park.

Artists offering stylish hell believe it's our just reward
Busyness people don't give a damn
Lost souls write to editors who just get bored
Bankers give actuarial odds on the End being near at hand
But to the Zippy it's a morally edutaining hologram.

Today's Modernperson won't sell his soul but
To pay off his mortgage he'll rent it
Arrange a thousand peasants' deaths, then Sunday church repent it
"Father I was only being professional."
So, hoping to clear his overdraft through the confessional,
He never tells his customers the facts. "They'd just resent it."

Everyperson knows but everyperson knows
Leave the battle to our punch-drunk culture heroes
Cheer them on every night landing blows on cellulose and tv shows.
Yet the Zippy can't leave it to karma alone - folks might have already spent it!

Politicians deliver pollution freed from borders, and everyperson
...................................... is just obeying orders.

But complaining's not enough, everymodernperson does the same,
Nor are Junkie or Yuppy or Terrorist the name
For a Zippy planning hir next move in the Game.

For SHE observes, even at lunchtime concerts in the irradiated air,
uninvited angels with unfashionably dirty wings, muttering in code of other things,
and clues, like dogshit, spread everywhere.
Nature's accusations stick to the soles of hir feet,
shards of cultural change get snarled in hir hair.
Market researchers keep turning up hope in the weirdest possible places
While hidden cameras record constantly compassion in failures' faces.

SHe sees it can only be Faith which causes their Despair :)
fraser clark. 1992

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September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What the schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism`s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I`ll concentrate more on my work'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf.
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose building grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out whereever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

— W. H. Auden

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The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— W.B Yeats

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