On Writing J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence)
Forbidden any right to write or speak to countermand
Stubborn, deliberate curses—the catcalls and Calumny,
I recalled Benda; I thought of Céline (or Louis-Ferdinand
Destouches)—polemical, cynical, his bravura ellipses
Turning every passage into miserable, broken verse.
The imagist paraphrase wouldn’t countenance clown-
Facedness, the prosy Hypocrisy of reporters’ outbursts—
Screeching, “Free Speech,” save for shouting others down,
Or denying em equal time to make their case? I realized
The Press can agitate Yahoos into lynch mobs via exhaustive
Denial of Debate: Twitter’s their mouthpiece, Facebook their eyes;
So that Opinion turns caustic in the guts of the costive—
As in the yellow bellies of jaundiced, jaded, yellow journalists—
Their giallo morals as lily-livered as is quivering Jello. Denied
Any pleading, I needed to be freed to speak in the resistless
Style of “Positively 4th Street,” i.e., bobdylaneque-identified,
Or in the stratospheric mode of The Byrds’ “Eight Mile High”
Or Hendrix delivering feedback—ezrapoundly—as if also
Held in a Gitmo cage on the Pisa, Italia, plains in 1945, facing trial
For Treason. That’s how I felt—the cinema dilemma, the Woe,
Of being a Black Cherokee accused of Murder by two degrees
Of separation only, and accused by paleface profs and lily-white
Journalists, who took the stratagems of Fascism and Bigotry
To exploit the Grief of Pamela George’s survivors and ignite
A mob to pursue—trap me—between ghetto and Ivory Tower;
Set the bonfire for my Vanity, to demand, à la McCarthy, “Have
You now or ever befriended (unwittingly) a Squatter poet for an hour
Or more, who deceased a Cree mother in her Easter-time grave,
And still you thought his verse could be published or read? Answer!”
Suddenly the Academy was a badly damaged barricade, a Bastille,
And all my ink was garbage water, and I was either a necromancer
Conjuring slain tribunes like Malcolm X or Jamal Khashoggi,
Or a vile and vicious niggerfied egghead, cold-blooded, unfeeling.
The Defamation gave no quarter, had neither bottom nor ceiling.
J’Accuse…! is my answer, the technique—pure impasto, gusto:
Unlike anything that anyone will ever, ever, ever, get used to!
Years After Stockholm
Atrocious Grief cankers all Nobility, I know,
for likewise my heart hammered hard
as the stammering sea,
because she’d no longer sink, lacy,
into the sweaty bed,
to murder all Mediocrity,
to be nougat to my tongue,
to engage in nubile nugae (trifles),
where we twain could be vulgar idlers—
making cohesive all extremities—
in our walled-off, silken slum….
We’d been to Stockholm for the torchlight parades
warming to the Nobel Laureate in Literature—
Alice Munro
(a Canuck topping at last
that Olympics-parallel podium)—
a smack-down of the bonfires that cancel so many authors;
and had turfed up the blackest, saltiest caviar—
truffle-sniff-worthy—
in prized sheets where my redhead darling was the habitué
of my bronze penumbra.
(Who’d dast invalidate her Radiance?
Hey, she’d spraddled her nice legs at—ahem—Nice—
catercorner in every quandary of limbs,
her milky angles milking me of that nursing fluid!)
Next, a half-pint of Champagne—
the insolent odor of burning books
(as covers singed, seared, scorched)—
banned! (Wasn’t that aroma canned
cavalierly in the caviar?)
Crimson curled her swirling hair,
as my Love was overborne,
while (boring) Munro bore away the day.
À Amatoritsero Ede
(in memoriam, Ken Saro-Wiwa)
The immeasurable ugliness of Abacha—
That peasant Macbeth, that black-tie antichrist!
His Ethics? Muddy Misery—ruddy as Ebola!
Berserk, that tyrant had the “Ogoni 9” iced!
Unbearably mutable, but terribly affable—
His presidential gaffes broadcast daffy Bombast.
He deemed poets best as corpses—“laughable”;
Sketched pathological ballets for each iconoclast:
Such undignified twerking as rope fanged throats—
The frightful biting of hemp unto the ninth jugular….
Headlong bleeding gushed south in crimson gouts.
Bunga-bunga and mago-mago were germane—molecular—
To Abacha, that common-place fraud, suave IMF crook—
The intuitive victimizer with the constitutive wariness
Of a pope. Who’d jail that shat-upon face, CIA spook,
Cet hitlérien, that public butcher, so psycho, so carious?
From the dirty soles of his feet
To the dirty feats of his soul,
His precious, vicious, noxious, “luscious” fascists eat—
Even now—like whores of whores, on all fours—the dole
Abacha paid out, that yellow-belly, menefreghismo joker!
Where the Niger flows into the Weser—tinted pale as a moth,
Amatoritsero Ede echoes Ken Saro-Wiwa and Syl Cheney-Coker,
While cream-crest waves beam distressed, distraught froth.
(Excerpt from Canticles III)
LXIII
Bedraggled straggler,
Bedraggled straggler,
How ya gon get to Heaven?
How ya gon get to Canaan?
Gotta trick the Devil with your smile!
Gotta deke them hellhounds off your trail!
Gotta squirm like a worm through the field!
Gotta take God as your sword and shield!
Gon drink down dew and chew up roots!
Gon join Jesus in ecclesiastical cahoots!
How else is you gon get saved?
How else is you gon laugh at the grave?
Ain’t the Milky Way your starry river?
Cross the Jordan although you’ll shiver!
Take the North Star as your compass!
The darkness is what each dawn outlasts!
Bedraggled straggler,
Bedraggled straggler,
No more be a laggard!
Salvation don’t wait on the laggard!
Crawl and creep, then leap up, haggard,
But free, and stride where once you staggered.
Stride—oh stride—where once you staggered,
Bedraggled straggler, bedraggled straggler!
[Tulum (México) 25/02/23]
XXXIV
I’m a-goin up to Canaan land
Where star-dusted tides show clear!
I’m a-claspin someone’s helpin hand:
Mercy be my train engineer.
Mercy be my train engineer.
Attentive to the maps I track,
I shed all weight and ramble light.
I’m a pilgrim who ain’t turnin back:
My one-way path follows North Star night.
My one-way path breaches North Star night.
Won’t let no storm me overwhelm!
Can’t let Sorrow hinder or harm.
My train’s got Mercy at the helm!
Soon I’ll be where embraces warm.
Soon I’ll rest where embraces warm.
Tender I’ll be where I can love—
Where my heart heals and lungs breathe free.
There’s no disease where I’ll now move—
Only certainty of Liberty!
Only certainty of Liberty!
[Wells (British Columbia) 19/7/19]
V
X got lynched in the place of the skull,
But now He’s Lawd and Rome’s ditched marble!
The tearful buried X, but bawled a libel:
Didn’t His broke-ope tomb unfold the Bible?
His blood twinkled, washing thy sins.
His body crinkled, so blood could rinse.
The crucifix—that scandalous wood—
Was Evil’s last stand, now downed for Good.
Lo! Coffins is gonna cough up the dead.
Dry bones’s gonna don fresh flesh, then tread!
The sun and the seas will all bleed red,
And sinners gonna be all self-destructed.
How’s the undertaker gonna undertake
When saints take to skies and the dead awake?
The King of the Jews is God over all:
Makes even motherfuckers cringe and crawl.
We gotta vamoose from Pharaoh’s place,
So our chains—like tears—dissolve to frayed lace.
Trumpet prayers, dawn and noon, night and day—
When God mumbles, loud thunder’s His bray!
[St. Peter’s Abbey—Muenster (Saskatchewan)
19/5/19 & 22 mai mmxix]
Trotsky in Halifax
Imperialism? A bargain-basement religion!
A free breakfast and a long sermon
in exchange for exchanging an artist’s brush hairs
for an assassin’s cross hairs!
I open History, preach it out,
for if it remains mute,
it mutes Oppression,
which thus remains unknown
even while no one goes unharmed:
Citizens become a regime of phantoms—
slaves, serfs, sycophants, imbeciles….
Curious Illegality—
though described intimately by opponents—
requires a crescendo of yowling—
the accumulation of a loud archive
of grievances—
to reveal its persistent pressures.
Let ink spill into sprawled-open books—
so singularly shadowy—
to instigate Horror, Revulsion,
at shambolic emperors—
their compulsive persecution
of pamphleteers morphed from ploughmen.
[YHZ—Enfield (Nova Scotia) 22 / 11 / 22]
Trotsky in Halifax (II)
After the chill flashing of stars—
the ghost blossoms of stars—
the silver-grey fringe of fog—
the uncanny, persistent fog—
bearing down within the clammy mist—
cometh splatters of rain—
blustering crustily over cracking ice—
drummeth April’s potent Pluviôse,
grandiose rain,
alongside surging chills, April-fresh.
No need—in this burg—
to pray and swear loudly
against the overbearing sun….
There is no sun!
This antique, eighteenth-century, North Atlantic Bastille—
the Citadel—
penitentiaries me in feckless “Hospitality”—
the fare of the British “Raj” in its ocean-crossing reach.
My gaolers expect my muttered response:
Words creeping from my throat,
delivered haltingly.
Instead, I will be as trenchant as the Atlantic,
never contemptuous of conversations.
(It would be unchivalrous and unpoetic
to not unfurl and wave banners!)
Anyway, lucidity of Sedition
is already the seismic unsettling
of the “opulent factorists.”*
[YYJ—Victoria (British Columbia) 4 février mmxxiii]
* Cf. T.C. Haliburton, “English Aristocracy and Yankee Mobocracy” (1840).
