"[Lucifer speaks:] Why Mammon sits before a million hearths
Where God is bolted out from every house.
Well might He say He cometh as a thief;
For He will break your bars and burst your doors
Which slammed against Him once, and turn ye out,
Roofless and shivering, 'neath the doom-storm; Heaven
Shall crack above ye like a bell in fire,
And bury all beneath its shining shards.
He calls: ye hear not. Lo! he comes--ye see not.
No; ye are deaf as a dead adder’s ear:
No; ye are blind as never bat was blind,
With a burning bloodshot blindness of the heart;
A swimming, swollen senselessness of soul.
Listen! Whom love ye most? Why him to whom
Ye in your turn are dearest. Need I name?
Oh, no! But all are devils to themselves;
And every man his own great foe. Hell gets
Only the gleanings; earth hath the full wain;
And hell is merry at its harvest home.
But ye are generous to sin and grudge
The gleaners nothing; ask them, push them in.
Let not an ear, a grain of sin be lost;
Gather it, grind it up; it is our bread:
We should be ashamed to waste the gifts of God.
Why is the world so mad? Why runs it thus
Raving and howling round the universe?
Because the Devil bit it from the birth!
The fault is all with him. Fear nothing, friends!
It is fear which beds the far to-come with fire
As the sun does the west: but the sun sets;
Well: still ye tremble--tremble, first at light,
Then darkness. Tremble! ye dare not believe.
No, cowards! sooner than believe ye would die;
Die with the black lie flapping on your lips
Like the soot-flake upon a burning bar.
Be merry, happy if ye can: think never
Of him who slays your souls, nor Him who saves.
There is time enough for that when ye are a-dying.
Keep your old ways! It matters not this once.
Be brave! Ye are not men whom meat and wine
Serve to remind but of the sacrament;
To whom sweet shapes and tantalizing smiles
Bring up the Devil and the ten commandments--
And so on--but I said the world must end.
I am sorry; it is such a pleasant world:
With all its faults it is perfect--to a fault:
And you, of course, end with it. Now how long
Will the world take to die? I know ye place
Great faith upon death-bed repentences;
The suddener the better. I know ye often
Begin to think of praying and repenting;
But second thoughts come and ye are worse than ever;
As over new white snow a filthy thaw.
Ye do amaze me verily. How long
Will ye take heart on your own wickedness?
Come now; the year and month, day, hour and minute,
Sin’s golden cycle. Do ye know how long
Exactly Heaven will grant ye? how long God,--
Who when he had slain the world and wasted it,
Hung up His bow in Heaven, as in his hall
A warrior after battle--will yet bear
Your contumely and scorn of His best gifts,--
Man's mockery of man? But never mind!
Some of us are magnificently good,
And hold the head up high like a giraffe;
You, in particular, and you--and you.
Good men are here an there, I know; but then,--
You must excuse me if I mention this--
My duty is to tell it you--the world,
Like a black block of marble, jagged with white,
As with a vein of lightning petrified,
Looks blacler than without such; looks in truth,
So gross the heathen, gross the Christian too--
Like the original darkness of void space,
Hardened. Instead of justice, love and grace,
Each worth to man the mission of a God,
Injustice, hate, uncharitableness,
Triequal reign round earth, a Trinity of Hell.
Ye think ye never can be bad enough:
And as ye sink in sin, ye rise in hope.
And let the worst come to the worst, you say,
There always will be time to turn ourselves,
And cry for half an hour or so to God:
Salvation, sure, is not so very hard--
It need not take one long; and half an hour
Is quite as much as we can spare for it.
We have no time for pleasures. Business! business!
No! ye shall perish sudden and unsaved.
The priest shall, dipping, die. Can man save man?
Is water God? The counsellor, wise fool!
Drop down amid his quirks and sacred lies--
The judge, while dooming unto death some wretch,
Shall meet at once his own death, doom, and judge.
The doctor, watch in hand, and patient’s pulse,
Shall feel his own heart cease its beats--and fall:
Professors shall spin out, and students strain
Their brains no more; art, science, toil shall cease.
The world shall stand still with a rending jar,
As though it struck at sea. The halls where sit
The heads of nations shall be dumb with death.
The ship shall after her own plummet sink,
And sound the sea herself and depths of death.
At the first turn Death shall cut off the thief,
And dash the gold bag in his yellow brain.
The gambler, reckoning gains, shall drop a piece;
Stoop down and there see death;--look up, there God.
The wanton, temporizing with decay,
And qualifying every line which vice
Writes bluntly on the brow, inviting scorn,
Shall pale through plastered red: and the loose, low sot
See clear, for once, through his misty, o'erbrimmed eye.
The just, if there be any, die in prayer.
Death shall be every where among your marts,
And giving bills which no man may decline--
Drafts upon Hell one moment after date.
Then shall your outcries tremble amid the stars:
Terrors shall be about ye like a wind:
And fears come down upon ye like a house."

-F*stus


Fat*s.

Still in print...!

"Put another way: this is open-source literature."

Hiniku
island · narrowly I kingdom ump

indigo · swim loo
abash Narcissus dybbuk · nonjuror airt

rank rodomont · owl-light warp
low Yalta ironhat · Kalmuck ivy-owl nab grim dump

only morass until murk platinum · idol numps
dungfly · illicit grisly

orbit snag which · inks mulch lungfish obitdorp
ormolu · ambit

bituminous antfarm · sarcasm
hook · nougat

2M1207b.

    "May our country ever lead
The world, for she is worthiest; and may all
Profit by her example, and adopt
Her course, wherever great, or free, or just.
May all her subject colonies and powers
Have of her freedom freely, as a child
Receiveth of its parents. Let not rights
Be wrested from us to our own reproach,
But granted. We may make the whole world free,
And be as free ourselves as ever, more!
If policy or self-defence call forth
Our forces to the field, let us in Thee
Place, first, our trust, and in Thy name we shall
O'ercome, for we will only wage the right.
Let us not conquer nations for ourselves,
But for Thee, Lord! who hast predestined us
To fight the battles of the future now,
And so have done with war before Thou comest.
Till then, Lord God of armies, let our foes
Have their swords broken and their cannon burst,
And their strong cities levelled; and while we
War faithfully and righteously, improve,
Civilize, christianize the lands we win
From savage or from nature, Thou, oh God!
Wilt aid and hallow conquest, as of old,
Thine own immediate nation’s. But we pray
That all mankind may make one brotherhood,
And love and serve each other; that all wars
And feuds die out of nations, whether those
Whom the sun's hot light darkens, or ourselves
Whom he treats fairly, or the northern tribes
Whom ceaseless snows and starry winters blench,
Savage or civilized,--let every race,
Red, black or white, olive, or tawny-skinned,
Settle in peace and swell the gathering hosts
Of the great Prince of Peace! Oh! may the hour
Soon come when all false gods, false creeds, false prophets,--
Allowed in Thy good purpose for a time,--
Demolished, the great world shall be at last,
The mercy-seat of God, the heritage
Of Christ, and the possession of the Spirit,
The comforter, the wisdom! shall all be
One land, one home, one friend, one faith, one law,
Its ruler God, its practice righteousnes,
Its life peace!"

--F*stus

"His writing, as Schalkwyk points out, is full of labyrinthine cities and restlessly criss-crossed landscapes..." (via wood_s lot)

"I've also always enjoyed more traditional art and poetry. I think there was a false division between abstract art and figurative art for instance. To like one and not the other was always ridiculous. As Schoenberg said sometime in the 1930s, 'there is still a lot of music to be written in the key of C major' and a lot of contemporary composers seem to be trying to write a new kind of music which also can sound traditional. This is kind of what I'd like to do myself. I'd like to write like Tennyson but make it new." (via Hotel Point)

"Ay; strange and startling is the first hot tear
That we have shed for years; and which hath lain
Like to a water-fairy in the eye's
Blue depths--spell-bound in the socket of the soul.
Death brought it not--pain brought it not--nor shame;
Nor penitence--nor pity--nor despair:
Nothing but love could. For a fearful time
We can keep down the floodgates of the heart,
But we must draw them sometime; or it will burst
Like sand this brave embankment of the breast,
And drain itself to dry death. When pride thaws--
Look for floods!"

--F*stus


Spooky.

"Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on." --Al*xand*r Smith, Dr*amthorp


"For traditional Muslims, the converse of tyranny was not liberty but justice." --B*rnard L*wis, What W*nt Wrong? (2002)


"I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fugue."

--Plath


"Forthwith, in fell Gorgonian venom steeped." --Cranch’s V*rgil


"And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature." --Dr*amthorp


Booty.

Phranc: Cap*d Crusad*r

   (spoken:) When Pope John Paul 2 · was in Japan
   He read a comic book there · about the life
   Of St Francis of Assissi · and said the Pope,
   "I think there should be · a comic book about me,
   So let’s call up Stan Lee."

(R, fast:) And move over Captain America
Step aside Incredible Hulk
Make way for the Caped Crusader
The one they call "The Pope"

They hired a Roman Catholic artist
And a Roman Catholic artist too
Every word and picture in this comic book
Is gonna be the truth

He was born in Poland
This comic book will tell
When the Nazis were invadin' em
Everything was going to hell
He was going to be an actor
Then he became a priest
Even after he joined the clergy
He wrote a couple plays

Wow, what a comic book
What a supreme pontifical release
Sixty four full color pages
Five hundred thousand copies
Wow, what a comic book
What a supreme pontifical release
Sixty four full color pages
Of infallibility

So move over Captain America
Step aside Incredible Hulk
Make way for the Caped Crusader
The one they call "The Pope"
Move over Captain America
Step aside Incredible Hulk
Make way for the Caped Crusader
The one they call John Paul


(from Folksing*r (1985)

"Orb of perdition! thou too shalt die out,
And thy red sheeted flames shall fail for aye.
Thy palpitating piles of ruin, hot
With ever active agony, and quick
With soul immortal, down whose midnight heights
The wrath of God in cataracts of fire
Precipitates itself unceasingly,
Shall rush into destruction as a steed
Rushes into the battle, there to die.
Thy quivering hills of black and bloody hue,
Death-breathing, shall collapse like lifeless lungs,
And end in air and ashes."

--F*stus

Got back my bout-rim*:


Falling swiftly into no blonde June
our Huygens went, and through three hours' stress
stonily gazed upon an orange moon,
one whose mystery sometime did obsess
a teenaged poet. Striped like coral snake
and cobweb-frail, those flailings now so moot
--yet still can freeze: one dream of yellowcake
found, with rippling waves, intact, a beaut.
And I will clasp it to myself, as Garbo
maybe no mighty secret withheld; but play
as if it might. I also as a hobo
piled stones upon a shore, my art for a day:
this gadget’s voyage, last and lingered rhinestone,
maroon clouds under, never-again cologne.


Arch.

B*ll*rophon discussion.

Spasmodics.

Umbrist imgrat · abuts frost
misgiving ostrich stash · zinc ammunition

ogmic · broil
tantrum sty · fallback

ubangi huzzahs sting · askant off
frabjous · sobornost

using · ithyphallic amps
ginormous asparagus · against

wisp · avant
gird and aglow so · isotopic strum grunt

My vocabulary did this to you.

In Axum...



"NEW DELHI—Thanks to widespread outsourcing of telephone-service jobs, a sixth caste has blossomed in India: the Khidakayas, a mid-level jati made up of technical-support workers."

     'Pessoa: Ah, Quanta Melancolia

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.

What an anguish stripped of hope,
what grief that only tastes the end;
if nevermore returned the ship,
if in the street a blind man fell--
give it up, there’s nothing else.

Without content, without repose
not a single hour of mine
in which a soul finds full employment;
the blind man in the street succumbs,
the ship then dwindles out of sight.

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.'

(My translation.)


Fado on M*tafilt*r.

Dr*am Tim*.

"The Kalmyks did not have the same relationship with Lenin that other Russians did. He had been one-quarter Kalmyk; and when the Soviet Union fell, Bair said, rather than take down Lenin's statue, the Kalmyks had simply turned it so that it faced out into the steppe." --Th* Ch*ss Artist


    "TOMORROW

Now that the others are gone, all of them, forever,
And they have your answer, and you have theirs, and the decision is made,
And the river of minutes between you widens to a tide of hours, a flood of days, a gulf of years and a sea of silence;

If, now, there are any questions you would like to ask of the shapes that still move and speak inaudibly in the empty room,
If there are any diferent arrangements you would like to suggest,

Make them to the riverboats, whose echoing whistle will be a clear reply,
Speak to the seagulls, their effortless flight will provide any answer you may wish to hear,
Ask the corner chestnut vendor, ask the tireless hammer and pulse of the subway,
Speak to the family on the illuminated billboard, forever friendly, or to the wind, or to the sign that sways and creaks above the stationer's door."

--F*aring

"Glenn had played more than four hundred tournament games, which I would come to understand was something like saying he had written four hundred sonnets, in public, while opponents who didn’t particularly like him tried to write better sonnets using the same words." --Th* Ch*ss Artist


Sidis in Dallas I slink · insalubrious nadir
dunks aggry lost long · and slushfund igloo skirmish

liquid ingots nab · kingdom island noctid
simoom asomatous looming · ulnar brouhaha ruinous

"Imagine Tom Delay as Pol Pot. I certainly can."