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Death is a Festival

‘He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of / all his neighbors, with pride at its right hand and / cruelty at its left’

By Anis Shivani
Poetry | Beauty, Poetry Tuesday, death
February 9, 2016

 

49.

Tears are either positive or negative. Beauty
is no canopied death but are you sure? The one
addicts himself for the most part to the law
or the binary “1.” There are blondes who are

such simply by deficiency of coloring matter.
Attracted by artificial light at night, from
whence we make a postliminal return, the
amnestied immigrants. The high ivied stone

wall of the potagerie, the gentle gold of the
industrial haze, a certain number of works
that are neither potboilers nor works of
individual genius. She had a full red mouth

that might have looked kissable to some, the
full childish lips living in poverty in York.

 

 

 

50.

A blind alley leading to the dead-end of a
circumscribed habit. The writer found in a
manganese nodule, adding urgency to dem-
ands about the two lowermost vertebrae of

the thorax: all we can do is protect society
from death. They, in their psychopathy, could
not see him as a man like themselves. That
the same goods should not be sold at two

prices on the same day, your eagle eye put-
ting price tags on my suit, my hair, my
shoes, 400,000,000 bushels remaining from
the 1948 crop. There must be a priesthood

of medicine, their mysterious and polynomous
ancestry, distorted lattice planes sliding over.

 

 

 

51.

He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of
all his neighbors, with pride at its right hand and
cruelty at its left: this bore out the theory but in
the Bantu case I did not hear of a supporting

slot on the tour. There was something very lic-
ensed about a glass of sherry, got his superfly
hair fixed up. You heard what I said, bitch, take
me to dinner and suck mah dick and et cetera for

dessert. The death and tender age of infancy,
fathers becoming gradually personages who are
to be disobeyed. No matter what you’ve read
about the radio revolution, subsistence is the

plain proof of existence, the professors have to
take their students to the country, it is alleged.

 

 

 

52.

When the informer receives the statutory penalty,
the white tansy, or agrimony, men are very cruel.
A rock is also said to have hung over him, threat-
ening to fall, the mirage which so tantalized French

soldiers in Egypt, full of objects of novelty, without
being able to enter it. Moisture drawn from the air by
dry salt of tartar, a NATO exercise, a ship’s fire, and

a funeral at sea. A small nebula including a bath in
bulls’ blood, they get very drunk in the tej houses.
Withered as an oak in winter, telegony might prevail
in the case of hereditary disposition, a message sent

by telegram. I must leave the reader to guess for what
reason this petty name, a dead relation of the author’s.

 

 

 

53.

She worked as a buncher in flower gardens. The
really dead people don’t talk after the massacre at
Kischineff, after the bloodshed at Homel, our self-
defense bands are bringing back the days of Judas

Maccabaeus. I am haunted, shadowed by Charles
and Martha Enderby, no one in these days can
live by poetry, with him as a brother by blood. I
always love to set the town together by the ears,

no gas to read by. The phenomenon of water-
bloom and a piece of land newly broken up, the
scab, the itch, the meditations of the closet. There
are special forms of these fungi, how she was once

a woman. I must have inspection papers, a bowdler-
ized version of it by this forest, good king David.