'Weeping we scattered the seed
on the fallow ground and sadly we went away.'
                                                       Evil's only an allegory.
Wherein it means something different than what it is.
Wherein it means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.
The absolute vices of intriguers and tyrants are allegories.
Not real ...
          You look quite puzzled.
                                   Jesus, Jesus.
I must've been a young fool
                              a right tool
when I thought that.
                       I did mean something by it
something good, perhaps. My thought was that
what these crimes represent
exists only in the subjective view of melancholy –
they are that view, the vanishing point
and destination of inwardness. What else
is there
to brood about?
Evil is a subjective phenomenon –
                                        The Bible proves it. The Bible
introduces evil in the concept of knowledge,
in the serpent's promise
                              of knowledge of good and evil.
But God saw everything was good. So.
Knowledge of evil has no object.
There is no evil is the world as such, it arises
within man himself with desire of knowledge
which, au fond, is desire to sit in judgement
to take God's place.
                    Knowledge of the good
is secondary, it ensues from practice – good ways,
or knowledge of the world. Knowledge of evil
is primary, it ensues from contemplation.
                                              Knowledge of good and evil
is therefore the opposite of factual knowledge – of this or that.
I tell you, it relates to the depths of subjectivity
and is then only really knowledge of evil. It is what Kierkegaard
called ‘nonsense', the nonsense of the human heart
in fear and trembling, its unrooted distensio.
The baroque sense of evil is quite inadequate, and rooted
in the deficient development of their plots.
                                                  I lost mine years ago
distended wanderer, collector of the peasant toys
they made me surrender at every border.
                    Even here they say no room, no room
no room for clothes peg soldiers, paintings by the damned.
          It's been a long wander down a long street.
                                                            Do you know
who you remind me of? Asja, Asja Lacis
                                                  who spent the revolution
consulting with her dressmaker – but made me a revolutionist
on the isle of Capri.
                    I meant it as a compliment.
                                                        Not that you look
anything like her
                    who carved this journey through me.
          Come on, come on.
I was twenty-one yesterday, I think, subtract the hundred
          throw away the numbers you're unsure of
I'm leaving three centuries behind me.

*

                                                  Do you know Hamlet?
Of course, of course. To be or not to be

                    to me it seems simple
                    not existential
                    non-referential
                    not relating, really
                    to the instabilities of
                    nascent bourgeois subjectivity
                    nor is he made of bits of wood
                    nor anagrams for lunch
                    nor is he allowed (or rented)
                    (je suis permis? je suis loué? ça veut rien dire!)
                    au contraire, il a rien à faire
                    but remember to forget they killed his father
                    comme lui a dit le fantôme
                    shut up, shut up about it
                    and marry the drip
                    Ophélie.

*

                    I began from the object
          riddled with error, myself. Ended up here. The city
Rimbaud hated
                    for its endless dreary Sundays, its fans
          of empty terraced
suburbs, the stupidity of their dim inhabitants.
                                                  Tried the East End first.
More like it!! I especially liked the docks, as he did
                                                  its little streets
like grooves
                where one might lose oneself, skid off
          then find the hard dark woods
of the Indes such as no-one's seen. They have made splendid imaginary things
of all that.
          I liked those little bars around the markets
                              where you heard
such useless words, white things
and strange little animals in their leather cages
sold to all and sundry by the Silvermen, ces hommes si pauvres, si nets.

But there was something I never understood about that place.

Soho had its charms
                    (although I was never able to locate them.)
Crouch End had a squat name
                              Highgate, a tomb. Notting Hill
reminded me of climbing up the steep inclines of Negative Dialectics
          (not a trip I've personally undertaken)
or an image of the cross – its allegory of love, of self-negation.
                           Camden was the box of cogs.
Kilburn – I'd seen a bit too much of that – and
          Islington's busy thoroughfare of minor beings
          (I is therefore I am).
                                  Highbury was a resting place of Egyptian kings
Wandsworth the full measure of magic and sex,
                              no more than a dull itch
          at the gangrenous shore of Greenwich. O but to be
                              done with the respectable town of bricks
of Silvertown beyond the reach
of a Knightsbridge you did not want to cross over
to other destinations on a Red Rover –

          Marble Arch reminded me of Heaven
a kind of roundabout to everywhere in town, its villages
of Hell – a park to hide in – a rotting plank, cleaned up – sure ditch –
the hammering machines of immigrants
in Redchurch Street
                         sewing up their own bright shrouds.

*

Many men endure the pain of Bachelor's Ill Luck –
the shame of carrying the can home in your left hand
of having no-one's forehead to smite except your own
with your right. I am no exception, although
eventually you come to quite like the solitude.
Like Franz I didn't really travel much. When I was younger
but not much recently. (Moscow was my love-trial,
counting kopecks for coffee, Asja Lacis unavailable –
watching plays with her husband Stefan George,
his loud German translations, my ad hoc commentaries
seemed to rather annoy the Russkies
& I found myself trying to show the proofs of my little book to nobody.
They left me out of the Great Encyclopaedia,
a nonentity of the Jewish Revolution
(the war was ditches and charred fields of red clay).
It takes a life as long as mine
                                    to try and fail to reach the next village:
you wonder why you came, or went
your message from a dead emperor doesn't play.
I tended to stay at home, wherever that was, yes,
and curse
the clotheshorse shape-shifter, The Odradek
          of guilt you can't get rid of
or contain.

*

I was a sort of frenzied browser
                                     with a sort of vague plan
To answer the frenzied rape of the Earth
          with a frenzy of procreation
To annex the irrational for revolution
          To find it in the vertigo of acquisition.
Necessity is the mother of desperation.

                                        Gaga in the Luna Park
my friend Sigfried Kracauer saw the Tiller Girls' high kicks
as akin to those of holidaying factory hands
rehearsing the jerky movements of the production line
producing a sexual liberation
that would liberate mankind.
I have purchased my few groceries at Flaneur's Food and Wine
on Holloway Road. (I had to laugh at that.)
and seen the mounted girl legs on a shop sign
performing a mechanical Oxford Street can-can.
And a small hunting bird – un chassagnol –
talking to a tortoise-head in spats and tails
and who could choose between the two of them
but that long-billed girl in a cork dress and waterford crystal heels.
No conjuring trick could stay the rise of uniforms
or fetishes of violence and of power
that mesmerised our age and yours. Applause: machine-gun fire
reified, the real bowing actors creased by flying lead.
The world an intoxicated forcing-house of meanings.
The pleasure of false-connections emptied out all other pleasures.
In my day there was no room for half-measures.

*

I don't like myself that much sometimes
but, on the whole, I like me more than what they've made of me.
I'm a ghost, a dense ghost
made of one kind of heavy water
Cut me and I bleed thought, stars. silent. but
the smallest speck of me
opens into a thousand universes of still more things to say
and, if the old joints creak a little
you could almost say I'm eternal
that thought of mine is of no more value
than as precious, damaged rocks
to you your eyes the colour of lost marbles
revealing only
only poverty
                 of your universal version of history.
I return, I return to the only state I cared for much:
The State of Permanent Emergency.

          To be your icon, your mirror, your Walt Whitman eidolon
fixed, unfixed, rolling on in a long peal of thunder
because you needed me
you need me now and always will.
I am the trace, the illness and the pill
for whose who live in waiting
to whom all things come. My firewriting is still smouldering
like my eyes, my dear one
                                 or yours burst into flame.

A child in the panorama who finds the sky too grey
who must be told by his mother
                                     "That's what the weather is like in war."

                      The world lives on itself: its excrements
are its nourishment.

          Without goal, unless the joy
                    of the circle is itself a goal
          Without will, unless a ring
                    feels good will towards itself –

          Thus every tradition becomes, for Nietszche
the legacy of something that has run its course.

          All that we seek – love, truth
These fruits of the sky, fallen on earth's palate …

Torn from the trees of God's orchards in heaven …

Untasted, without nourishment, spoiled, already rotten.

          The experience of our generation
taught that capitalism would not die a natural death.

*

                                        Forgive? forget?
The young are laughing on the streets, their bloom
soon to be sucked up by the great Wen.
                                                      The Great When.
I think it's now, or soon.
                                Firewriting, ah there was a thing.
Everything else went down like ninepins.
          I mean everything.
Velocity? The giant's toothbrush? Grinning all the way to hell
on a celestial railroad built over the bones of the dead.
          White Teeth.
I see one of your lot's written a book about that.
Too late to read it now. Too late for tales of those who went
or those who stayed.
                    Let's hear the stories of those who came. I quite liked …
what's his name?
                 You want to wash my face?
          Why? Is the Kaiser coming?
Well, I daresay he'll take us as he finds us, as ever,
if he can still climb up those seven flights of stairs.
                                                            Brecht. Yes. Him.
Now he was okay – though not what I'd call one of the Good People.
Not really. Nor am I – a
                              sprucer who blued it,
                    I might as well say. Another jab?
                                             Excellent!
At least I won't be going back
to that bungalow of ricky-tick
                                    up the arsehole of wherever.
Firewriting though.
                    Each sound its proper letter.
          I can see them jumping now
jumping into a thousand pictures of light, coloured sand icons
on a zinc kaleidoscope, heated by a filament
of rare design, a harmony-machine.
All the old signs obliterated
in a trice, a touch, a vanishing of dust
yet how we all danced on our clockwork wheel
in the frozen attitudes of a masque of death. Do you see them?
                              Do you?
Motes & men.
Of which I had had such a strange dream. I dreamed & dreamed I dreamed
Everything
          & then forgot to wash
                              & shave
before recounting its story
& now I am marooned forever on its island shores.