Impotent
Do not misunderstand as we see her spread
Terrible
a spectacle
Your half-finished erection building
Oily
shiny
corrupt
and very small
The body and the actual face
matter very little, of course
Your double chin
Odd clothes
Quite ridiculous
An idea spiritual but largely pictorial
Mind full of
Bare
Legs
Mere
Other people
Never let it come to the surface.
Keep everything hazy in mind now
Amuse yourself in the peculiar clarity
Which Hell affords
Disappointment, anti-climax is certainly
coming
Allow this disappointment to occur
on every human
Endeavour
Learn to live the transition from dreaming aspiration
to laborious doing
Disgusting little human vermin
Degrading the whole spiritual world by
Unnatural liaisons
There lies our opportunity;
There lies our danger.
I’m still learning to experiment with spacing when I transcribe these from the photo of the blacked out text. I wonder if maybe I did a little too much this time. But I like having “Bare Legs” on separate lines like a pair of bare legs in the stanza, followed by “Mere Other People” in a way that almost mimics the lines before, but end up wrong.
I also think maybe I should cut a couple of the lines. I love all of them individually, but I’m not sure that the stanzas starting “Never let it come to the surface…” and “Learn to live the transition…” belong in this piece. They maybe feel like part of something else. But I haven’t committed to killing that darling yet.
I still very much feel like I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to poetry, but it’s fun and fulfilling to train this new muscle.