Within you phantoms of reality
Danced with plausibilities of mind,
Seeking to be consumed
By the oblivion which is understanding.
You feared that your return to motion
Would mean a succession of disappointments—
Tamely grazing arrows
Changed to wounds by the desiring heart
Take my hand and move.
Only two statues can stride together
In a manner invisible
Save to certain unreasonable adjustments
Of eyesight and of hearing.
DESCRIPTION AND EXHORTATION
Truly, this age will be known
As one of minute extremes
Courting an elderly shape
In a violent bar-room scene.
An Amazon made filthy by centuries,
And fuming pygmies, own the stage.
Thin furies of emotion
Name every color in the rainbow
Without its skillful assent,
And little mental skeletons
Stamp with clumsy weirdness
On effigies of the heart.
The pygmies often sneak
To the prancing Amazon
And the ensuing love-scene produces
Small memories of Walt Whitman.
This age is not metaphysical.
Followers of Dada,
Weary of electron-soliloquies
And fleshly ecstasies with flat feet,
Sit in the gallery
And throw loose malice at the display,
Evading their motives with an eager creed.
Concentrate your aim,
Followers of Dada.
INEVITABLE
The insurrection of a flea
Compared to driving tusks
Of elephants, is just as strong.
Stupidity need not be long.
The insurrection of a flea
Attains philosophy and spice.
Fleas salt their eating with a creed
That warms the monotone of greed.
The insurrection of a flea
Will leave with tense insistence till
The suburbs of eternity.
O small fanatic on a spree.
The flea is poet in a land
That does not understand his lunge.
He makes his own immaculate laws
And awaits forever threatening claws.