DegenerationAfter Max Nordau
Let us expand the category of the degenerates______who muddy this utopian age of pure______money and science, to include poets______(in addition to criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and lunatics).
The problem with the poet is that he lacks the rigour______to adapt himself to the existing — the cause______of his dwindling — and becomes an idle meddler,______a cavalier visionary, monstrously ignorant of reality.
The danger of the poet, as with an ugly fetish,______is his power to exercise suggestion, although of course______those hysterics moved by his influence______are already, ipso facto, degenerate subjects.
Let it be said that poetry is atavistic.______It is a twaddle, a babbling and stammering,______that only imbeciles and academics profess to understand.______Clear speech, by contrast, is for capital minds.
(We must concede, however, that the poetical method______wielded by one such as V, notwithstanding______his asymmetric skull and pointed ears,______yields experiences that are perplexingly beautiful.)
White Australia
Black Caesar, a gargantuan escapee from a West Indiansugar plantation, pilfered £12 from a dwelling housein London — and was cast away with the First Fleet:378 days on the purgatory sea to Botany Bay.
Sophie, a Malagay slave in Mauritius, torched a barnhousing a collection of leather straps — the flames soaringlike the sounds of the black horses inside — and waspacked off in a ship-sized crate to New South Wales.
Priscilla, in Jamaica, did not poison her master,but she watched him purge his peculiar sicknessinto his wife's bedpan — the ceramic one with floral motifs —day after day, without great discontent.
A Khoi Khoi man, smaller than Ned Kelly and paler of face,became a bushranger in Van Diemen's Land — althoughBlack Caesar, famous for his hard labour and gunmanshipamong the Founders at Sydney Cove, was the first.
Before he bolted he even got a shot away at the AboriginePemulwuy, who had killed the governor's gamekeeper;(Pemulwuy took seven pieces of buckshotthat time and still did not go down in history.)
Of course, the colonial office properly stopped it all,but by then Martin and Randall, also among the Founders,had set up Dixieland — outside Sydney — their progeny spreadinglike mice or men right across this wide brown land.
Diurnal
The universe yawns,cavernous as a mirror.
*
Half of earth's creatures:star-struck and blind.
*
A dream, earth-boundand sudden as a cockroach.
*
Night