A Poem by Ivan Arguelles

[jihad]

it was a inflammatory thing very
the pope read quoting a palaeologus
Michael II emperor of byzant about
the holy war proclaimed by the Prophet
in the year who knows when and
all around are fires burning are
moats being considered around Baghdad
are the very ramparts of are
nothing is pure the stratosphere
is a hell of pollution waste gas
noxious fumes of human thought
rising from the abscess in the tooth
being employed by presidents of
Moloch with his jaws churning in
dream the oval office rose tinted
and will appoint as generals
Gog and Magog on either side
money is the fuel for love are
ardent desire to overcome bad sleep
habits when passing through deserts
it says in the Bible what are
the envious doing here what are
the thing is about the eglantine branch
the dogwood in flower the white
intense upon white before bleeding
the insane who are kept inside
Jerusalem who cannot explain mother
who assume father is the target
raising the blazing scimitar high
to cut the dove neatly in half
wonder in what century it will end
can it end the hypothetical iron
now rusting inside Shulamit’s breast
it will end the nerve defiant
in the resembling Eye! motionless
the wave immobile the wind senseless
the north of sky toward which
crawls the Beast unerring in song
are then others so removed from
is such the capacity of man to
why is the garden thus laid bare
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
painted universe descried from afar
out of control in its infinite gyres
does then the sheep cote sink in dark
the hundred asbestos angels are quick
in their flashing quicker still Krishna
passing silently through 3000 brides
“be thou my Love, still the beating heart”
for each constructed city a paragraph
of ire and spite for each other side
the reckless banks of sand collapse
are fortune and its Hollywood a reality
as is no more the small drugstore
where for a magazine of powder one
could purchase the end result
fallen to the curbside and armless
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
which is the century of the Golden Horn
and which the minute past caesar’s death
why it matters on the flickering screen
who dances in red beside a dread japan
who eats china in a repeated trance
why are they at the door why are
for this brief instant the multiples
of history shine like malibu neon
but for the sluggish ethiop stream
psychiatry metempsychosis lethargy
why they are not with us this day
the fabulous planets of Poesy
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
plunge then the tinsel Primavera
into her dry well, suck out the soul
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
dynasties like argent cobras pass
through migrations of awful dust
one is there who but none instead
stand outside the cycle in review
watching unidentified armies clash
watching each still point dissolve
it is never resolved but brain dead
in palo alto trying to match Boolean
ciphers the world of intransigence
some small some lesser yet and some
for whom a lunar madness fits
for whom the
attach
slumbering Air
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
resist the Call

ivan arguelles
09-17-06

See 9th Street Lab: http://9thstlab.blogspot.com