The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas. Lorenzo Thomas. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Lorenzo Thomas
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Жанр произведения: Поэзия
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780819579003
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facile delusions

      And the clothing edging the plump door

      A frighteningly ponderous human body

      Suddenly the face of Charles Baudelaire

      Crushing on the television screen

      Waking the thick solitude of common-

      Place individual people. Confused

      Lost. A man whose heritage and biography was death

      He said so

      Past back

      in the mornings

      And demanding this song with your content

      From me, the personal to be what person

      History of a single man you are completely

      Yes, but who are you

      ■

      Start the thing over again:

      DRACULA is not a myth but

      Just another cheap novel

      Written in the boring 18th

      19th century made into the

      Worst film of 1932 1958 and

      Unless we get wise to our-

      Selves next year over again

      Then what is all this

      Dracula is real Dracula is real!

      ESSAY The demands of the loving human flesh

      substance

      A man and himself.

      European habits

      Colorless eyes filling the empty sleeves

      Of the earth, another Slavic conception

      After we keep on asking, What is that in the gypsy

      language

      What is that thing we no longer discover

      Effective about our own faces in the glass

      Underneath the B♭ chandelier

      The final odors of our dinner in person

      Shudder in the monotonous drawing room

      Still you have nothing else to amuse you

      It compels. It compels

      The imprint of his RNA

      On physical objects and

      Space he insists on it,

      Insists he has been dead

      Over 300 years and we

      Suggest we believe it

      After the trance we put

      On our hypothetical

      Subconscious mind Dracula

      Dracula is real! good lord!

      How do we understand it

      It is life you have founded

      Death’s mythology on, when

      Your substance demands Get

      Out of that umbrella now

      Right now.

      And now you are brushing yr teeth

      With the language, trying to get

      The decay out of the classical music

      That lurks behind each evident crime

      Every clumsy seduction of falseness

      And mechanical simpering pride that

      Moves like a film across the eyes

      Distorting the incredible color of

      Summertime on crowded sands

      An unashamed obvious bur-

      Lesk moving like a sloppy

      Sneak thief in the dreams

      Floating like sunlight into an awful

      America white and unhappy as drawn

      by a dull artist who lusts and his

      Creations for the darkness of blood

      And insane crime. But it’s a crime

      What he’s doing and beyond statute

      THIS IS A WORK OF ART no matter how

      Unnecessary it remain to our flesh

      ■

      These last lines of it spoken by the midnight doctor

      And left hanging in the flat air over the station

      To be snatched by the violent train of his thoughts

      Suspended sentences drawing sighs from the placid

      Snake tooth mouth of our Dracula. Changes his form

      Assumes an entire jury of peering witnesses walking

      Deliberately like negroes on the street,

      And then the strict transformation rabble

      Screaming and waving pockets torn off

      The most respectable fences in the town

      A lynch mob. Simple. This is nothing

      With symbols except the holy mystery of

      Our people in this country today. God

      Have charged them with the presence of the unwanted

      The necessary black negro and this is the way

      Our people bear their judgment

      There is no release in the songs

      Their music is dying They try to steal

      Heat for the beautiful instruments again

      The black ones learn to play these

      Machines but they leave our people screaming

      Silence Nothing happens. More nothing and

      The loss of the land hangs in the air

      A rotten rapist. Stomach full of bloody

      Advertising. Sculpture or is it dance

      The hanging orchards of America but our

      People are so ashamed. The signs alter

      Our cities serving the sacrament negro

      Motion and feelinglanguage logic blood

      The jig. Boss. Silent, it is without Dracula’s

      Ease he sucked from the ersatz florentine walls

      Something is yet lacking in our people’s religion

      Said the doctor at midnight

      Speaking their own language at that

      ■

      Rejection and the knowledge it is a sense of loss

      We lack, that only such emotion could complete us

      When we are tired of our thoughtful survival and

      Cry to be married to a cringing darkness and capture

      It in our own souls. Petty lunacy of each stilled

      Evening in some totally unremarkable place, under-

      Stand that as the torture of our rapturous manners

      The white glitter of our impressive table

      Manners and thoughts that go nowhere after

      All we are content to have surround us and

      Lift