Feathered the light of these itinerant snails Downwards to death, their purple-gored traces Glistening with the empty, the concordant shades of blood Into the entrance, into the ceremony ever-begun. Light casts, with deafening fades, the mortal cry And mewl of each new coffin-day. I am left to pieces of nails, shavings of life Ground into hesitant fingers with the blood, The sharp blood, the claret-red blood, the blood of pain Not minimal or faded with these years Desperate with their diminishing returns. Downwards to garlic days hat-hung with no trick Of haberdashery bald with artistic references, No "literary" cast I was so firm Would on these pages ever hang, Not even that of "the world's most scandalous magazine" In a proud ferment of its own moral scandal Communism said would never succeed. Ah, who has triumphed now, Pierre Naville? And must we longer make legitimate defence When Senile Moscow, hacking with final blood Drew its autumnal breaths in bloodless August. No, dialectic perished with the leaves, With Leningrad and with the sickled flags. The bourgeoisie exploit still, and we wait For proletarian culture to be born With its clenched fist swelling with inner blood, Black-blooded October, though with fading hope Buoyed only be price-demonstrations when the face Of Nicholas everywhere looks from telegraph poles. Hang with enemies in cosmology, to whom Idealism Is something which it can even be suggested is a "trend" in philosophy, Nothing legitimate, hang with the enemies of Surrealism Who yearn to chlorofoam its "cackle" "By any means necessary"? No, let me rather hang with Czarist pimps, Even with blue face, and with flashing teeth, And gums corroded, if the wonderous eye Sprung from the optic nerve of life above Should shine.
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Updated Thursday, 04-Mar-2004 14:58:29 PST