Epstein – poems 2 die for

NOW I SEE/PRISTINE

It’s not
the Sistine Chapel

no,
more a pagan temple
more suited to
demon worship

having a lovely
forbidden cult time

God knows where
they got their hellish
iconography from
avatars
of extreme
bad taste

bet they didn’t get
it in a single impromtu
haul by
way of incognito
trip to Walmart

much mix ‘n match
mythology up
in fresco (alfresco)
as long
as it conjures up
chaos, destabilizes,
vaguely terrifies

have
to ask the angels
(better angels
of all our natures)
regarding the sound
proofing
and how much
scream dampening

thick
as the armour on
a Tiger tank I guess
no one not invited
does not
need to hear a thing

and starting with Sistine
falling with
absolute loss
of grace from there

now I see
(Oh, how I see)
what billionaires think
of in secret, in private,
in their self-
owned 747s, self-owned
off-shore islands
when they
hear the word “pristine”

and with that rhyme chime
time to draw our
paparazzi portrait
of what
Edenic landscapes, sexual
configurations
float unfiltered but
fatally contorted
into theit imagination machines

with all that money – – whisper
shout proclaim
that word
for all eternity, for the
sum total of the poor,
shabby lifetimes
of us in
the 99.9

with all that money
Cheops pyramids of money
nothing in
or between Heaven and Hell
you cannot have, make real.

ISLAND

no bell tolls
tinkles even
no alarm
or siren

nothing to
tell nobody

because nobody cares
nobody is listened

hope
that featherd bird
is cannibal kebabed
skewered on the fire

this is an island
packed with an
accumulation
of no men
great rich big
small men
all of whom
are islands

everyone
everything is trapped
for which
all must get praised
for manufacturing
something so
close
to the Hell ideal
beautifully evil

power’s
beautiful, soulless child

THUNK IT

academics in the files?
who would
have thought it,
thunk it?

mirror me this
mirror to mirror
what is
the academy to
the narcissism
of ideas?

what reverse alchemy
at work here
turning gold
into base metal
turning base
metal into
something
far worse

turning billions of U. S.
into something unspeakable

turning
the final dream of
community
into a confederacy of
Caligulas

and there as touchstones
sextants to
navigate such
progress

Professors of every
discipline and indiscipline
from triple X
to Zee

our Alphas, Betas
and outright Omegas

there on the island gowned
for the occasion
fiddling with
what bit they know of
intellectual apparatus

performing research
for the
benefit of mankind on
the most unwilling of subjects

walking subtexts we
need to read
from below, behind
and between the lines

until, with
deadening “thunk”
the truth is right there

EMPTY

the plane is full
the plane is empty

every champagne bubble
could be its own
tiny universe

every chess match
ending in stalemate

and not
every island
is Devil’s island
not every
island has a
Devil

even the
Devil fears the advent
of pure nothingness

why
he could well be
so desperate
to rebuild, redecorate,

have
his domain
look more like Heaven

ROCKET

rocket
sprocket
in your pocket

so this is the social benefit
of billionaires
of wealth creation
the utter beatitude
bounteous bounty

pushing the boundaries
of masculine sexuality
through
the ceiling

right through the shitosophere
out into the absolute zero
of everything held dear

GENERATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS

when I first
heard you were
in those files

I thought I must
have misheard
your name
being mentioned – –
how the Hell
could it have
turned up
there, Wow! WTF,
I mean
there but for the grace
of God, how
can it be
go figure!

unless
it was just a typo

or a mess up
in the transformational
generative grammar
as it maps
the deep structure into
the surface syntax

garbling everything we
near universally agreed
you (dear emeritus
professor)

felt in your heart
of hearts,
did most radically think and believe

DEEP STRUCTURE

and suddenly, totally
unexpectedly

I fell into a poem
talking of manufacturing
consent for a
“great artist” and
the deep
structure of
irony

thinking of you
too excited for words
flying to that island
that
great M.I.T. brain
up in the clouds

eliding
your Kubrick
redacting
your Nabokov

soon to be
there with Woody
playing it again

and the gods of satire
drooling at the
thought of
the fall
from great grace

into their
     realm of scruffy
syntax
   and superbly sordid
                     semantics