God answers with my doom! I am annulled
this poetry blanked from the fiery ledger
my lies be answered by the worm at my ear
my visions by the hand falling over my eyes to cover them
from sight of my skeleton
my longing to be God by the trembling bearded jaw flesh
that covers my skull like monster-skin
Stomach vomiting out the soul-vine, cadaver on
the floor of a bamboo hut, body-meat crawling toward
its fate nightmare rising in my brain
The noise of the drone of creation adoring its Slayer, the yowp
of birds to the Infinite, dogbarks like the sound
of vomit in the air, frogs croaking Death at trees
I am a Seraph and I know not whither I go into the Void
I am a man and I know not whither I go into Death——
Christ Christ poor hopeless
lifted on the Cross between Dimension—
to see the Ever-Unknowable!
a dead gong shivers thru all flesh and a vast Being enters my
brain from afar that lives forever
None but the Presence too mighty to record! the Presence
in Death, before whom I am helpless
makes me change from Allen to a skull
Old One-Eye of dreams in which I do not wake but die—
hands pulled into the darkness by a frightful Hand
—the worm’s blind wriggle, cut—the plough
is God himself
What ball of monster darkness from before the universe
come back to visit me with blind command!
and I can blank out this consciousness, escape back
to New York love, and will
Poor pitiable Christ afraid of the foretold Cross,
Never to die—
Escape, but not forever—the Presence will come, the hour
will come, a strange truth enter the universe, death
show its Being as before
and I’ll despair that I forgot! forgot! my fate return,
tho die of it—
What’s sacred when the Thing is all the universe?
creeps to every soul like a vampire-organ singing behind
moonlit clouds—
poor being come squat
under bearded stars in a dark field in Peru
to drop my load—I’ll die in horror that I die!
Not dams or pyramids but death, and we to prepare for that
nakedness, poor bones sucked dry by His long mouth
of ants and wind, & our souls murdered to prepare
His Perfection!
The moment’s come, He’s made His will revealed forever
and no flight into old Being further than the stars will not
find terminal in the same dark swaying port
of unbearable music
No refuge in Myself, which is on fire
or in the World which is His also to bomb & Devour!
Recognise His might! Loose hold
of my hands—my frightened skull
—for I had chose self-love—
my eyes, my nose, my face, my cock, my soul—and now
the faceless Destroyer!
A billion doors to the same new Being!
The universe turns inside out to devour me!
and the mighty burst of music comes from out the inhuman
door—
June 1960