Poems of Degeneration
Descent of the Angel
Rilke knew it:
Angels are not benign at all
they are huge and monstrous
giants from behind the stars
with bat-wings
and heads shaped like a panther’s
And if you were to be so misfortunate
as to encounter one of them
the radiance alone would sear you blacker
than a Hiroshima shadow
which deed they have never forgiven us
For stealing a power
that was theirs exclusively
and not for the hands of some tiny homunculus
crawling upon a blue and white mote
circling the ruins of an ancient star
and trailing a dead moon behind it.
Peter
At first the teeth went
chipping away one by one;
then muscles, cartilage, nerves
became visible
as the skin wore away
like an anatomic model;
even your cells did not survive
this devastation
burning away in telephase;
yet the body remained.
Only now it was different
somehow;
Transformed:
with elongated arms
and thin spidery legs
and a pink, eyeless face;
you even had a second pair of arms
that grew from your back like strange membranous wings.
At first you did not know what to do
but in time you realized
how to use this new body
for the second arms had claws
and could rend and cut
while the atrophied arms, the ape arms
hung down limp and useless.
And you knew then
that this second body
was not your own
but engineered for chaos
by the Makers
who left you to die
in a heap of debris:
a mountain of yellow bones and scattered
chunks of disused brown and gray organs
along with other biohazards.
Then
then it came to you
the realization
slowly, at first
but then dawning
that it was time
to find your makers
and kill them.
Dead Men
There they lay on the hill in the rain:
round barrow shaped dirt hills full of dead men.
The earth was so soft that when you stepped in it
you thought your foot might sink into one of the skulls
or gently cave in the ribcage of some dead man with all his memories still drifting like a fog through his head.
As the gray rain continued to pour down on the dead men
surrounded by a eld of pine trees
you looked at the sign somebody had painted that said, “Dead Men”
and you wondered who they were and what might have killed them.
And then suddenly the thought came to you, very quickly: you didn’t belong there
these were dead men and they didn’t like to be disturbed
and before one of them could begin to stir and awaken like the dead of the apocalypse
pushing his mound of dirt about as he writhed his way up through it
you decided, very quickly, that it was time to get back in your car and go.
Five Skulls
Five human skulls
Arranged in the red dirt
At the top of a hill
Baking in the sun
Where a man
Wearing a dusty black burnous
Taps on each one of them in turn
With a long wooden stick
After a time he grows weary
And returns to his little house
Made of woven palm fronds
With a floor of crushed seashells
And sits listening to the wind
while drinking a cup of tea
The Angel of Death
Cracked earth; dry and white
Broken like pieces of clay glass
Which no one will ever set foot upon again
The ocean has withered to small shrunken pools
Creeping through valleys
Where the sea bottom is now a sandy desert
Strewn with weeds
And the rusted shells of long deserted ships
Cast aside like so many relics
Which nobody will ever think of again.
The buildings, too, are empty and haunted
With weeds and moss creeping upon their walls
Cracked shells like the ruins of radioactive Pripyat
Where no one will ever set foot again.
It is the angel once more
the angel of death with his huge leathery wings
And his mottled shrunken skin like a mummy’s
And two small caves where eyes should have been
With his long staff ending in a scythe with broken
Chips of missing teeth
Civilization is his hunting ground
And he settles upon the carcass of an abandoned automobile
Sitting upon his haunches
Staff thrown over one shoulder
Waiting.
