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BLACK HOLE
OF YOUR HEART
part one:
SEPARATE
AMPUTATIONS
unsequential quatrains
by
Susi
Farkas
dedicated to the memory of Omar Khayyám
The words that poets weave are
spun from skeins
of shoddy shredded from the planet's screams,
and whether in Belfast or Naishapur
they make the tent that shrouds men in what seems.
The man who has nothing
to hide
cannot tell
stories.
Humans are almost everywhere.
Most other animals
are rare.
Mice are very brave.
We are the shape and the colour
of dying,
coffin-shaped, the pinkish blue-grey
which we call white - the colour of lying.
The taste in our groins is the taste of decay.
Towns are walls
and locks and ugliness
and peace denied.
Barbed wire defines the countryside.
A lamb skips gaily round the
field
and romps to its mother's belly.
A farmer drives from dawn to dusk
and then he gapes at the telly.
Who wash the water
I have pissed in
dam the world
to luxury.
He lost his fur
in a storm, and, instead
of letting more grow,
he's been trying to change the weather.
When brain is blasphemy
of body
touch is the only
revelation.
Communications
are the maggots -
and the corpse is
Man.
Life flows dog-like among the bones
and there is no meaning or rhyme or reason
to the invention of meaning or of loans -
Freud and Hitler lasted only for a season.
The beauty
of duty
is the apotheosis
of neurosis.
As a bubble in water, by its
own levitation
rises up to its own, in its own is destroyed,
sex is a rupture continuous as creation
whose season ceases in consummate void.
The continuous sirens
of the city
sound the endless pursuit
of happiness.
Each springing, wringing death
which starts and ends a dream
of glowing forest fungi glowing soft and secretly
to claim the hands which touch the clutching flesh impatiently
squeezes out the groin like soft and warm ice-cream.
Supermen
are not what men will be
but those they killed
so they might want the more.
When the cleverest
is necessarily the stupidest
life is ineluctably
a botch.
The tragedy of evolution:
it has stuck at humankind
and so become a
static institution.
The cannibal rich.
My ownership of a fourth-hand car
is financed by killed hunter-gatherers
felled rain-forest and wiped-out species.
All that meat -
the babies
that no-one*
will eat.
*(not many of us - so far, at any rate)
When we die
may you and I
be as two buttons
on God's fly.
Rejoicing in leaves and spiders
I bow to every dog I meet
knowing that trees
also are intelligent.
A poem in praise of Brown
Betty
who is not the lover I wish for,
strong and wilful and sweaty -
but a pudding I just need a dish for.
In 1792 Tom Paine's The Rights of Man
sold a quarter of a million copies in England:
less than the oak-tree-years required
to build a ship of war.
Please god
don't let me die
until I've finished
the Damson Pie.
Man's inhumanity
to man's a natural
result of man's inanimality
to animal.
Because he does not delude
and cheat his mind with hope
the only honest person
is a misanthrope.
In
my rural idyll I am exercised
far less by the increment of petty irritations
than by the multiplicity
and magnitude of human crimes.
My poor poems
are piglets
cast before
dead, cultured pearls.
Factory-farmers say
unhappy animals
will not produce -
but just look at human beings!
We stamp on happiness
trying all the while
to give unhappiness
meaning, form and style.
They say Grace
before the animal
who was the grace
that they pretend to seek.
I sneak
into public gardens
before they open and after they close so I can peek
at plants without the people.
My dog:
he heard
the sky
bark.
There are cities of corn
where corn tramples the earth.
Where there are fields of men
the corn too is trampled.
Monsters too have headaches.
Kissbombs
in Belfast:
Social workers wounded.
Hygienic
people
smell
of murder.
You write a poem.
stop, then silence.
The silence is
a better poem.
There is a snowflake
in my heart
and I must keep
it warm.
The sensitive are driven by normality
to refuges of second-best
which connoisseurs call art, doctors call madness,
and saints call ecstasy (when they are impressed).
Pascal/Rimbaud
O castles! O seasons!
What heart has not its treasons ?
O castles! O seasons!
What heart has not its reasons ?
The city. Today I saw
a thousand people
and a dog.
And only the dog smiled.
Love is an egg
broken in half
to hatch a purpose
for loving.
When we have lost
the twilight
all that we have
is loss.
Upon the planet that's a miracle of pain
ah! the faint glory of the human brain
evolving through so many million years
- to be possessed by envy, goal and gain!
Charity is
a hedgehog
turned inside
out.
When need
turns to greed
the heart
turns to art.
Art is the craft of display
in which the great are greatly alone
and the rest are merely
arrogant.
The clockwork mouse grew bigger
and became a rat,
a bigger rat, a monstrous clockwork rat
in a vast mechanical trap.
This is the age of the toy.
I cannot be
until I have
only my life
to lose.
The influential people
that I've never met
are the bushel that my light
must hide beneath.
When relationships hold us in
thrall
and money establishes worth
it's the strongest who go to the wall
and the bleak who inherit the earth.
The mind is
cancer in the
Crab-man:
Nature's hubris.
As ten thousand species are destroyed
and the world is rent by civil wars
scientists in Los Angeles
discuss the foresting of Mars.
Before the coming
of Ragnarök
and homo sapiens' sad remnants also quit the scene
I hope in desperation.
Only the bad are famous;
the good remain invisible
unknown among the mad
millions of the unknown bad.
The Rights of Man only seem to
be negative:
the right to be illiterate
the right to wear nothing
the right to have no name.
Some of us rule
and most of us serve
but still a few
have the humanity to do neither.
Spending our lives
cleaning all the things we use...
Is dirt more filthy
than the concept of purity ?
There is no
such thing as 'society' -
only social entropy
and social engineering.
Amazing mathematics
make immense and magic fires.
Tribes of pale neurotics
use electric hair-dryers.
We are dealers in pities
senile before we are old.
We have discovered since cities
only poison and gold.
Playing with lies
as diners play with cruets
are the would-be spies
who are merely poets.
All poems are translations
and all life interpretations
of existence
and of substance.
There are many original sins.
Perhaps the worst
is thinking that oneself and one's
species has the least significance.
Old men are callous to be old
who should have died of sorrow
knowing there is no And Yet
and no Perhaps Tomorrow.
We operate
soullessly, and soullessly expect
our separate
amputations to connect.
Please god
don't let me die
before I start on
this great poem which I....
(1970-2003)
