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Alphaville Books <[log in to unmask]>
Sun, 6 Jan 2008 14:10:07 -0500
text/plain (116 lines)
  Dear Churles,

Your question might be partially answered in my Poem De Rerum Natura: 
Hearing Voices though I reference another Invasion. It appears in 
FlashPoint 9 <http://www.flashpointmag.com/drvoice.htm>. Also, Peter 
Dale Scott has given FP some interesting work and Joe Brennan's work is 
steeped in contemporaneous(sic) expression borne of Pound and Joyce. CP

The first 100 lines read (Line breaks may be lost):

* *

*De Rerum Natura: *    * Hearing Voices *

*
"This duty is mine and no one else's;
        The gods on Olympus cannot touch me,
        For I am withdrawn from light and reason.
Despised, blood-dirty, barred
        From the council and conversation of the gods,
        How freely I leap on my prey."
                       Spiraling in the updrafts,
Picking off toothsome Platonists
                From the Acropolis.
Cracking out their skull-pulp on Scylla,
                Shitting the rock white.
                Dogfighting Navy pilots
Over Kuwaiti oil fields.
                Doing a chicken walk
In the path of a presidential motorcade.
	    Mocking the patient oncologist.
Mocking the industrialist's philanthropy,
         Running his duality to duplicity.
Doubting the wound at all.
         Bitter to bring the world 
         To reflection.
As Vico said, "It's impossible to deny anything they say
        Unless you attack them from the beginning." 

Thank God, I'm not a country boy
         Who's first taste of the big city
Is from a window of the day room at Walter Reed.
         Passing through the gates 
On Georgia Avenue circa 1965
         To fight off the harpies of sentiment;
Rows of amputees set like headstones in the sun
         Honing their inner Arlington.
"The new holy trinity is organization, technology and information.
         The new priest the technocrat."
And what better paradigm than 
         The provincial mind of the Catholic
Stunted in its shadowy precincts of dogma.
         The wafer of knowledge sealed in the monstrance.
Even though "Moral distinctions 
         Are not derived from reason,"
         The Jesuit was not at all too Humean,
Confusing dread with skepticism,
         Kierkegaard with Bayle.
Though "passions proceed not from good and evil
         Like the other affections,"
Hume--- and Aristotle, reasoned away opportunity,
         Allowed anxiety its ideal object,
And, not surprisingly, the priests avocation became photography.
Hanoi Jane despised for her unattainable beauty
        Reserved for hippies, millionaires and gooks
        By those heroes of the mean
For whom conscription was not enough
               Of an abject whipping.
         What dangers lie in wringing 
         Reels of myth from mediocrity?
"That reason constitutes a moral weapon,
         When in fact it is nothing more
         Than a disinterested administrative method."
What political aspirations
         Scripted for McCain and Kerry
                    In their servitude?
The Ho Chi Minh Trail doesn't need to prove its veracity 
         Against the paper trail of Phoenix,
Bean counting at MACV or
Dropping in on the Hanoi Hilton
         Without a reservation, Oh ye
Who evangelize the canard of reason.
         Lansdale told the Catholics that
The Virgin Mary had been seen redeploying to the South
         And the Seventh Fleet came and parted the waters.
So who you callin' ignorant, Donny?
         I'm not the one shitting into a bag.
I'm not the bully pushing around the guy
         Who all damn day pushes him around. 
I'm not the one waiting 
         For my 10,000 ejaculations in 
                    Men's mag purgatory.
Ignorant? Because I picked the lock on history,
         Looked passed the jibbering staff, 
Gazed into another boy's eyes, 
         Took truth's hot shrapnel
And seared the sentiment right the fuck out of me.
         Knew somewhere, somehow,  
         That Tonkin was not my Lie.
                   That My Lai
                   Was my lie.*



Charles Moyer wrote:
>  Just a little prick of the sword in the side of the sleeping Fafnir (Pound
> List) since it has indicated some life by this recent blink of an eyelid...
>     "Mauberley", finest antiwar poem of the 20th. Cent. Still altitudes
> above the subterranean simple-minded crusading warrior-politicians now
> served up by the Amurikan stewpot.
>     What good is Pound if we can not make him new and relevant to our time
> and an antidote to the mass murder machine with the "Gott mit uns"
> mentality?
>     "pro domo, in any case"
>   

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