"I will show you fear in
a handful of dust"
~T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

...drip,drip,drip...


The sound was astounding in its diversity
The sound was terror embodied
The sound was prejudice, fear and ignorance
The universe smashed on its desperate edge,
All else was stillness save the red raw smoke
Bones cracking out on the moors, in the wilds
And the wastelands
That sound of pain crushing the winds, smashing
The windows on all the seven-thirty-three trains
As if the vast absorption of Hell,
A monster, Ahab’s whale, his vicious vendetta
Come undone like a horrible conundrum
Breaking symbolism and metaphor
Soliloquies and asides,

Across the black sky a Diomedeidae,
The Dead Albatross
Wandering from Amsterdam, to Canada
And far down to Antarctica,
To nowhere
And tomorrow...
Dead like an engraved
Metal plate illustration as by Doré
Invoking the supernatural rime
“Day after day, day after day,”
The ocean, the opium,


And that terrible sound, bending
Breaking, cracking, creaking
In the flesh & the alleyways
Of every bound and wounded city
(I was standing
on the edge of its
shadow - I felt the
cavernous crust of
crumbling bricks, of dust
from the Golgotha walls
where the gargoyles hide
contained in splinters, in glass
in smoke... the sound;
I was there, against the
haunted flowers of the
beautiful; alone
hour by hour, within
the hour
like the murdered moon
I was there)
The painful sound of nails dissolving
In the dreams of history; hissing...
To the many small things
That nature conceals;
To die, to be born, to die again
In sin and absolution of the heart
And wake

Another monster, the Architeuthis
This twisting thing
Unmeasured fleshy form
(Für Elise, Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A minor,
arpeggio sounds...
inside the crashing waves)
Furlongs in duration, the creature...
Forever arms wild
From its wastelands and coiling
Perverting and grotesque
Wetly writhing like the black branches
Of Poland’s oldest woods,
Belavezhskaya Puscha
Primordial
Old,
How did the Giant Squid ever end up
Inside of that dark place?

And above the ancient towers
The Dead Albatross
Soars,
As if flying fast from the ugly
Sound,

Unbound, like echoes & green Hedera ivies
That decaying sound swallowing colour & smell
(“Nature!” And I
was standing there, inside
in the guts of abstracted midnights
& smashed glass & the dark air;
I was there)
Unordinary, that underworld sound
Unearthly wailing...
Banshees in subways--
(I was in some kind of danger
to the erotic and
the perverse)
Putrefying
Petrifying
Bitter squalls in the air
(Nowhere
was safe),

The Dead Albatross
Fought for many centuries
With the Architeuthis monster
In those black woods;
The wind changes,
Only slightly
And still the sound
It pounds,

Unnerving,
The hunt & haunt continues
A thousand voices speaking backwards
Tongues tied & twisted in torture
And tintinnabulations...
Dogs hissing venomously at
Unseen things:
--or were they gods, slithering w/
The wicked witches?--
Evening falls and windows shatter,
Explode
From every building in the grey city
Cars crash!,
Drums & trash cans smash on the sidewalks,
Bones break, trains derail, the black rains...
Conundrums
“To go or not to go”
(It was dark),

The hunt would go on
The Dead Albatross, gone;
As it was over... just
As the nightmares began
Seeing the many arms in the glass
The reflections,
In the mirrors, in the winds, in
The wilds. (Nowhere safe but
for the moment
thus I sit), Angels & aeons
Beneath the harsh angles
And the gun-gray poetry of the streets,
Mean as the old tenements
Fading as the Old Testament
From golems & graveyards
Torn from the webs
(A telephone is
ringing, I answer...
“Hello?”...
–static– hissing, and that
terrible noise. Then,
her voice
from the other side...
“why did you kill that albatross, Ted?”
my heart froze,
the rest was dark...
Save for the vision of the Architeuthis,
as black as any European forest)

Time fades, time never fades
The sound ends, the sound never ends...
Humans live unaware
In the factory of raw smoke and sorrows
Passing under of the new moons...
(Was she really ever there?
what did you/I see, out
on the moors...
that horrible night, listening to
the gun shots & my her heart beating, screaming...
the sound of the dead waters,
and that dire splash?)
Blossoms and the universe
In the instant like a Polaroid
Turns it breath into uncertainty
This moment endlessly as mysterious enigmas
Streams in a New England winter
(I move,
I cannot move...)
Like Titus Andronicus in Hollywood
–not Viriconium or Gormenghast--
The albatross was never there
Nor was the Architeuthis monster
Only the high-rise where
The rooftops touch
The universe,

In aria arrangements,
A never-ending
(hearing her) heart-
Beat... life’s dead
Orchestra
(alive.

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