Weltende Variation # ?
The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the stoning of a guitar pick
Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois' pointy head
A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose
Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship
God's hand descends into a glove held steady by the police
At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other
A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer
A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone
The peace night makes according to the world comes
Note: von Hoddis: author of 'the first Expressionist poem,' Weltende, published in 1910. His poem has been aped innumerable times (Auden's 'The Fall of Rome,' for example), hence the questionmark in my title.
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Story of Or
To pose nakedness is
To refute it. A pose
Is a clothes. Like
Stanzaic arrangements of
The word which should
Ideally, be in pain against
Its w and its d. No slack
Is why such heaves of or
To denude itself could
Make us exude gold, yet when
Was that ever opposite enough
What scream or epigram
This sperm has come
To measure our mouths for.
Note: For 'or' to free itself from 'word,' it must strain ('heave') against the 'w' and the 'd' that enclose it. If, via this strenuous (perhaps squeamish) process, the meaning of 'or' is transmuted from the English into the French as a sort of homage to the pseudonymous author of 'Story of O' (Histoire d'O), then, alchemically speaking, (or so an Aurealist might suggest) it will have risen from the pose of its measures to or-emerge as an else-gasm.
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
An Instructor's Dream
Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them; why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then"
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room's
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Monopoly
Finally the day dawned when a monopoly owned everything in the
world
So it went looking for its stockholders to celebrate
But they were all owned by it they were all dead they were
someplace
Their photographs hung in elevators which went up and down up and
down carrying nobody
Everyone else was in bed doing exercises to get in shape for noon
Hey the monopoly said let's uncork the World Trade Center and get
blotto
Silence
The monopoly scowled
All it wanted was a little good-fellowship, like you get in the
highrise apartment-buildings
Then the sky got awful dark
Gee
And everyone was in bed frantically doing those exercises that get us in
shape for death
Exercises known as "kissing" "fucking" "caressing"
Everyone was unaware that they had been bought
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Lesson
Our love has chosen its appropriate gesture
Which when viewed in the midst of all the gestures
It didn't choose seems almost insignificant.
The gesture our love has chosen is appropriate
We both agree not that we have any choice but
Amidst all those others does seem insignificant.
Is it incumbent on us thus to therefore obliterate
All of the gestures except this insignificant one
Chosen by our love for its own no doubt reasons.
It is up to us to obliterate all other gestures
Though they cluster round thick as presentations
Of war and sacrifice in a gradeschool classroom.
Use of our love's chosen gesture for the obliteration
Of all those foreign gestures is forbidden however
We must find something else to erase them with.
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Misunderstanding
I'm charmed yet chagrined by this misunderstanding--
As when, after a riot, my city's smashed-in stores appear all
Boarded up, billboarded over, with ads for wind-insurance.
Similarly, swimmingly, I miss the point. You too?
And my misunderstanding doesn't stop there, it grows--soon
I can't see why that sudden influx of fugitives,
All the world's escapees, rubbing themselves lasciviously against the
Berlin Wall.
They stick like placards to it. Like napalm. Like ads for--
And me, I haven't even bought my biodegradable genitalia yet!
No. I was born slow, but picking up speed I run through
Our burnt-out streets, screaming, refusing to buy a house.
Finally, exasperated, the misunderstanding overtakes me, snatches
up
Handcuffs. So now here I am, found with all you others
Impatiently craning, in this queue that rumors out of sight up ahead
somewhere,
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Feeding the Sun
One day we notice that the sun
needs feeding. Immediately
a crash program begins: we fill rockets
with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then,
after long aiming
--they're off. Hulls specially alloyed
so as not to melt before the stuff
gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills,
aborigines etcet into the sun which
however, grows stubbornly
smaller, paler. Finally
of course we run out of things to feed the thing,
start shipping ourselves. By now
all the planets-moons-asteroids and
so on have been shoveled in though they're
not doing much good it's
still looking pretty weak, heck, nothing helps!
Now the last few of us left lift off.
The trip seems forever but then, touchdown.
Just before entering we wonder,
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
The Were-Age
'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You've heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can't go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death's monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Poem (Chicago)
'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You've heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can't go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through
Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death's monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
Excerpts From the Diary of Damocles
I don't dare speak too loudly,
some timbres could be fatal--
that string is not too strong
I think: and at times I have
to breathe. Or maybe I fear
my paraphrastic exhalations
will spoil the oiled perfection
of its sleekness, will mist
over that brightness whose
needle sharp point compasses
my every stray. I am as
edgy in my way as it--
as little-rippled, as subtle.
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!