Yea, I am the lidless, dispassionate Eye that pierces the murk and the mist—
My tears are a laughing,
My laughing a weeping—
I watch and I wait and record,
Brooding over my soul, that dried lava-stream and granary of volcanic dust;
Brooding over my brain, that mirror of the implacable trivial.
I am a shadow that is more real than a substance,
Am skewered and pinioned to offal—yet my soul is a
Kremlin of unapprehended magnificence,
The Vision Malefic and the Vision Beatific, too.
I live and am not, am the Infinite withered to naught.
I watch, I record, and I weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.
MY DIVINE HATE
The world is the Temple of Pain grounded and mortised in lies—
And that which they have told you is good I say is maggoty with lies.
Hope is a whore and love is a lie and a flea has more for his labor than a man, the wisest of whom is still earth’s awkward buffoon.
To-morrow is God—they have added a jot to Eternity!
Know they not to-day is Eternity and to-morrow its lewd, beckoning shadow?
And love they have sanctified because of its delicate tickle.
Pah! this rotten old breeding-patch circling the sun!
From the center to circumference, from nadir to zenith,
I, the eel that slips through the Great Bungler’s hands, survey and judge and cannot be lured by these old temporal cozzeners.
Yea, forever I vanish, I change, yet forever stand firm,
Flying the flag of Rebellion from the Temple of Pain, knowing the Thing that skulks in the adytum.