Max



Let’s make excuses and besides I just want to be high. A swell-taken catastrophe. Now that those credulent years are over, now there are no stories to be believed in, our fancy is paper cut-out angels. I am patiently waiting on death. There must be something to console my vanity. There must be something to satisfy this lycanthropic appetite. Study sessions for star-bred civilisations. Shit, occasionally I even remember that I’m not very talented. The recollection is pleasant on the scale of a long draught of Madeira. Springing towards a subversive future, laying down in fields of oblivion. Blurred pictures of winter-sweet and the dark sky of the night overhanging. The shoulder blades of Atlas holding that sky in place. Photos from out of space concerning concepts from the middle ages. Let’s have faith in the young idealist. Yes, let’s believe in the purity of blood. Max Rothman’s just another one of the decadent bourgeoisie. He must be wiped out in accordance with the process. Those who have not conformed, those we shall now obliterate. Music of the the ninth wave during late spring evening-tide. Thetis became Proteus and Philomela, she became a nightingale. There are nights in cruel April when I hear her melancholy voice perpetually. For this and for other reasons I move through life disconsolate. God’s dead I said baby that’s all right with me.


Sylvia and Pomp
flowers lustrous as gemstones
litter the path
  like so many
coke bottle tops
along a frontage road
 
trees as tall as Titans
cast their lofty shadows
across the young pair’s
footsteps
 
sun beams flicker through
the splits in the leaves
and make tiny sparkles
flare up in their eyes
 
a gurgle of water
like from a classic Grecian
fountain warble its way
along beside them
  trailing silt and sand and
critters sensuously succulent
 
all along this sylvan stretch
the colours and the shapes
of nature dance in a
synesthetic riot
 
traveling light like
accomplished vagabonds
the young couple live on
laughter and the hope of their
childish love
 
who knows what ogre,
what fortress, or what
promised land waits around
the next bend
 
temptation trips apace
like an acrobat traversing a trapeze
high wire, high strung,
such great heights are
dizzying
 
the breeze up there is heady
like an aphrodisiac
or a glass of warm ale
 
their sails are raised;
no emblem but the stark whiteness
of
their vision