First Clown
We gaze upon a negro shoveling coal.
His muscles fuse into a poem
Stifled and sinister,
Censuring the happy rhetoric of morning air.
Some day he will pitch the stretched simplicity
Of his tent upon the contented ruins
Of a civilization,
Playing with documents and bottles of perfume
Found in deserted, broken corridors.
Second Clown
The barbarous comedy
Lost in profuse confessions
And often described as life,
Lends an attitude of conviction
To the mechanical retreat of time.
First Clown
Do you hear beneath the irregular strut
Of this city an imperceptible groan?
Time is turning the jail-house key.
They build larger jails for time;
He makes larger keys of blood-stained iron.
Endlessly he emerges
From complicated delusions of freedom.
Second Clown
That desperately grotesque
Wanton known as imagination
Can plunge beyond both men and time.
Imagination slips down
Upon the last edges of thought and feeling
And teaches them to transcend
The forlorn bravado of swinging legs and arms.
First Clown
We are two psychic clowns
Brandishing the poverty of words
Into insolent oddities of sound.
Come, men are waiting to nail us
Upon the crucifix of their little logics!
DEAR MINNA
Catastrophe in a bric-a-brac shop.
The proprietor lies murdered.
Pieces of cups, jars, and vases
Have attained the disorderly freedom
So obnoxious to bankrupt fanatics.
Once the cups, jars, and vases
Were symmetrical and empty,
And immersed in the task of holding nothing.
Now they have snatched a voice from fragments;
Spell many an accidental sentence;
Renounce the hollow lie.
Death, you take the stiffly obvious shapes
Of objects and crack them with your fingers—
A shattered invitation
To curiosity and anticipation—
And I am grateful to you for that.
My eyes grow weary scanning the living array.
Each man takes his inch upon the shelves
And will not move, until your paw
Robs him of microscopical convictions.
Dear Minna, read the newspapers
And gloat with me over death’s industry.
Banker, Freudian, Socialist,
Knocked from the shelves and changed
To symbols that can lure conjecture.
It is well that we are metaphysical.
Death must not become
A mere black frame surrounding
The memorized reiterations.
Death must remain an irresistible
Beckoning to reckless speculations
And continue to offer an amorous arm
To the recalcitrant antics of words.
VILLAGE CLERK
Rabelais and Maeterlinck
Have subsided to one grin
Upon your sharply cumbersome face.
Coarseness and a psychic hope
Dominate your voice
As you prattle to women
Purchasing sugar and salt.
Then your face and voice
Alter to a serious fraud
Eagerly learning the technique of deceptions,
As you answer this dryly emasculated
Grey-beard, discussing the tendencies in hogs.