Songs for the Devil and Death

by Hal Duncan

  to place this stumbling block between us two

  that I will tumble over reaching out to you.

  Still I would reach, would offer what I can,

  for what it’s worth – a fig, a fuck, a damn –

  though every word seems hollow, paltry use,

  despair defying hope all hint of truth.

  So if there’s nothing I can give you I will hold

  your body, warm for now, and dread it cold.

  XI

  As every rose comes with its pricking thorn,

  so every love demands that pain be borne.

  Frustrated, fierce, two souls lock in embrace,

  fighting or fucking; in each other’s face,

  We scratch, tear at each other’s chest:

  fine, then; fine, then; and all the rest.

  Or sullen silence, or unspoken curse,

  the thorns of bitten lips, bitter and terse.

  Shall I compare thee to that thorn dug in

  deeper than any surface scratching of the skin?

  Shall I say there’s no hurt, no harm, no hate,

  belie the blooded passion of this state?

  No, I will say, a thousand thorns may drive me wild

  and I will bleed for love, and to my death be reconciled.

  XII

  Muses, Apollo, choirs of the dead,

  river your voices, swell as one wild wave,

  to break upon my heart, crash over head,

  and crack the rock of me. I’ll rant and rave:

  I love you, love you now and love you more

  as seasons turn, as months construct a year,

  as weeks build out of days. The rivers roar:

  I love you, love you now and love you here.

  Here in this island soul, the rock, the beach,

  the sands on which you stand, your flag unfurled,

  this farthest shore beyond the farthest reach,

  with you here now I am a brave new world.

  Your love grows jungle wild, as from one sapling tree

  a forest spreads across the continent of me.

  Sonnet 42

  My love is like a red, red fire,

  my heart on flame but out of luck.

  You are my death, my funeral pyre.

  Ripped out and torn and blown to fuck,

  my heart explodes with my desire

  to die beneath your monster truck.

  I offer this, this tawdry verse;

  nail-gun it to my dead eyelids,

  then light the fuse, blow up my hearse!

  My hopes are crushed; my life is shit.

  Put your behemoth in reverse,

  drive over all my broken bits.

  [From here the MS can’t be read,

  The last two lines reduced to shreds]

  Sonnet 43

  When I sit in a bar now with a drink

  and wait for friends, I also wait for you;

  for as I wait it gives me time to think,

  remember that first night, and live it new.

  I swallow Guinness nervously and smoke

  in buzz and chatter I try not to hear,

  while waiting for that first ice-breaking joke,

  while waiting for a stranger to appear.

  I watch the door and swallow once again.

  I start this dogg’rel rhyme, tawdry but true,

  to fill this time with a poetic pen,

  the first time in some years for this, for you.

  My friends arrive, and at this fool they smile:

  still waiting, waiting for you all the while.

  Still Lives

  I

  What poetry looks at fruit upon a table

  and does not see – unwilling or unable:

  paintings of rot, varnished, upon the walls

  of a museum; Nero dribbling as he calls

  out in the colosseum, wipes a juice-stained lip;

  a cricket ball polished on a grass-stained hip;

  a golden apple, chaos, thrown into our lives;

  an orange sucked, seeds spit like acid jibes

  between Arcadian shepherds; or, if such

  fancy is for fools, at least a taste, a touch,

  a scent, a sound, in imagery of grapes,

  some hint of nectar, and of gods and apes

  gathered around the banquet table for a feast?

  Such poetry lacks the hunger of a holy beast.

  II

  Here, in this modern fitted kitchen, where

  my hands construct banality from five

  bananas bunched and brown, a pair of pears,

  an apple just as green, just as alive,

  here on the white formica’s urban chill,

  where four bowls sit – ceramic, wicker, glass

  and porcelain – the fruit in them alive but still

  (and did I mention the tomatoes? I must ask,)

  here, all arranged in balanced composition,

  here the grapes, here Delia’s cookery book,

  I now articulate in forms humanity’s condition.

  Here, I say, come take a closer look.

  Here is the fruit knife, short and sharp of blade.

  Here is your bloody eye cut out and laid.

  III

  “Blind” Phineas stands there in the gallery,

  champagne in hand, fag in his mouth,

  listens to words – jejune, passé, a travesty –

  whispered and hissed within this harpy’s house.

  A flick, light as a feather, of contempt and ash,

  flies from a menthol tab, at tap of finger’s tip.

  He notes their nods – a glib commercial trash,

  red nails that gleam slick as a lush’s lips.

  “Blind” Phineas desires what they defile

  with words like concept or original or style,

  their magpie intellects unsensual as they peck

  for meanings, thieving, picking, leaving not a speck.

  No matter what they take from him, how much he gives,

  it’s dust in their dead mouths; in Phineas, it lives.

  IV

  I, Apettence, father of Foresight, thief of fire

  who lit Highpeering’s chariot as a pyre,

  look out upon the Ocean, hear the Caw, the Cry,

  the Crow over the cornfield, in the swirling sky.

  Skulls of my fellow titans, greying bone

  as fossil fruits now turned to stone,

  I lay upon a black and ochre plate,

  the hard fruits of my generation’s hate.

  I lay my feast to paint for Juice, our lord

  who broke the Crow’s stone sickle with a sword,

  steel as the palette knife I use to mix

  the thick red-umber twilight on the Styx.

  We were the powers who, in primal time,

  supped on the god of grape, his blood our wine.

  V

  Grave me an ode upon a funeral urn,

  sonnets of black and ochre, fine-lined grace

  of classic forms museumed in space

  and time. Now put a bullet in it. Turn

  and scan history as a war-torn foreign place:

  see Babylon fall on your TV sets, see Baghdad burn,

  humvees patrol the road of no return,

  the trials of grunts. Soldier... about-face!

  Will you paint pictures of sweet fruit to mask sour taste

  of spoiled milk spilled from broken churn?

  Or will you, poet, as a lion in the sheepfold, pace,

  savage and true to forms of new rhythms – fuck the rhyme?

  Turn as a corpse behind a car, hung from a streetlight, a dead soldier.

  Turn, twist and turn, poet; use the sharp edge of the serrated volta.

  VI

  Omens in Rome speak of Byzantium’s threat.

  Omens at home speak of the East and foreign dead.

  I see a golden bird, guts spilled to smell the tainted heart.

  I see
red blood, white fat, and a blue sky of falling stars.

  But more: from Empire’s cradles and Republic’s graves,

  dead babes crawl, grow, and learn to walk as slaves,

  naked but for a shroud of privilege, a veil of rights

  gifted by grace of their elected sovereign, Might.

  Free speech whipped up to moans upon a frightened whim,

  the social contract stripped, draped now in battle hymn,

  serfs to the senators, the ministers, they groan and come.

  Listen. The voice of the obeying mob is heard as one.

  Legions of Caesar, be not afraid that your new century will fall.

  Your dead march on and, from the cots, new corpses crawl.

  VII

  Paint me a picture of a presidential dish

  laden with heads of baptists, eyes of fish,

  a harvest of swords and words of war,

  the lie of an apple mouthed by a fat boar.

  And us? New fruits and rotting old,

  plucked hearts heaped up to gather mould

  in a display of piles, shingles and hives –

  these are the sitting death of our still lives.

  Mute the TV to silence that might better show

  the fruit sprung from this poison tree we grow,

  terror’s temptation, sold and bought:

  revenge is a dish we serve gunbarrel-hot.

  We are the fruit and worm in it, the lips and seeds they spit,

  the spreading branches of a tree rooted in shit.

  VIII

  Where is salvation, where the paradise on earth

  when we return to Eden with a bomb, a gun

  or our own sword of fire? Gods of the hearth

  weep at the heathen infidels we have become:

  no shepherd Tammuz, just ten Haji martyrs to the cause

  with car-bombs aimed to kill their brothers and our boys;

  or a brave Tommy, filming war crimes to applause –

  heroes to make us proud or make indignant noise.

  Into the stone age we will bomb you, hear the leader say.

  Age of the goddess of the grain store, beer and bread,

  I ask, what difference lies between the stone age and today,

  age of the god of broken words, damnation and the dead?

  Where is salvation, where the paradise, where will Jerusalem be built

  in this scorched earth, salt-sown and torn, this barren land we’ve tilled?

  IX

  Bring me my cluster-bombs, bring me my M-16,

  bring me my pen, bring me a fucking poem,

  bring me my chariot of words obscene,

  and we’ll destroy Jerusalem, Byzantium and Rome.

  How long is it since Dulce et Decorum Est?

  What land is holy mired in blood and spoil?

  Do we now shrug that Owen spoke in jest,

  To be forgotten in his foreign soil?

  Here is another fruit, a life, let waste,

  but this one lives still, as we frown and nod

  at how it’s crafted, worded, paced,

  as fit and fine as is to die for God.

  We must rebuild our holy cities in our flesh, our deeds,

  or be the flesh on which the Holy Emperor feeds.

  X

  Can we restore the idyll of the bread and wine,

  the humble painting of an apple in a rhyme?

  can fury turn to joy in the mundane,

  and muted sorrow at a meal’s mortal remains?

  I say it can’t if we see this and only this,

  or rot the apple to recall a traitor’s kiss.

  I say it can’t if we see bread without the bill,

  a feast of shallow melancholy. But, I say, but still...

  O, but I say it can, it will, it does,

  in relish of a butt with peachy fuzz,

  in life seasoned with salt of spunk and sweat,

  in the flesh of our lives on our own table set.

  Choose to devour ourselves, relish our lives as strange,

  and in that choice, that moment, everything will change.

  XI

  In Bremen: a flop-fringed German horror boy, sapling tall

  in hip jeans, bullet belt slung low, black tee waist high

  in revelation of cotton (O, a waistband); O, a distance to fall

  in failures of language, failure to read a glance, failure to try.

  Out in a pavement cafe sun, I read a verse or two

  out of Uche Abaji’s book exchanged, drawn

  out of his black leather satchel after chat grew, flew,

  out of his lecture and my circling thoughts on Others. Hail response!

  In Germany for other reasons as the World Cup plays

  in every bar, cafe and restaurant but this, I dine

  in Kapelle, eat rindergeschetzeltes, watch arms raise

  in roaring celebration in the streets, balls booted high. O, the divine

  moments we spend unmoored from our locality, our tongue:

  these are the precious, ticking, talking, aging seconds that keep us young.

  XII

  To be strange, to be a stranger, is to live.

  I offer up the strange fruits of this as a gift,

  worth little, free and simple as a plum,

  a bletted medlar from a drunken, ranting bum.

  A doggerel of sonnets, ripe to pluck,

  laced with the usual vodka taste of fuck,

  fruitbasket from a fruitcake and a fruit,

  I chuck the rotten things with no excuse.

  Medlars are best, I understand, this way,

  taste richened by the rot, the flesh’s decay.

  As fallen fruits ferment in their own juice,

  life has a strange taste that I think of as the truth.

  If there is one thing being strangers to each other gives,

  it is to know that Dionysus, as the stranger in our midst, in us, still lives.

  Sonnet 56

  I cannot free the words to say,

  I cannot sleep, I cannot dream

  but lie awake at break of day.

  At break of day, before the post,

  the cars hum down the street outside.

  In curtained grey, I lie, a ghost.

  I lie, a ghost, with you beside,

  naked in sleep, softly alive,

  while I – with gaze and touch – confide...

  confide the shackled love I long

  to rip for you from coward’s heart,

  from coffin’s silence, safe and strong.

  Believe me, love, I curse this rotting tongue,

  these bitten lips bloated with songs unsung.

  The Rock of Carrion’s Kings

  I

  Arise, new gods, in tongues, decry this state:

  dead pleasure’s dome, insanity and hate.

  Kin of kaballa, stream in dreams, and thrive

  in rivers rushing fresh from source. Inscribe

  stone carven lists to measure man;

  but overflow the sunless dawn to scan

  far past the evenfall of reason’s gloom,

  a city, dark as an eternal tomb,

  where dust as heroes, sleeping kings of day,

  grave grand tomorrows into yesterday,

  awaiting mourning’s wake, too drunk to see:

  now here, it was and is, will ever be.

  Arise, new gods, as Babble, to an afterworld anew,

  built of our feared desires, fierce dreams come true.

  II

  The city is a soul, the soul a city

  at the end of time, with Rhyme a ditty

  stumbling through the wild grass of illusion’s fields,

  past an Arcadian monument to death unsealed.

  And here I am with Rhyme, here too am I

  upon this rock where legend died,

  the author, history, modernity all slain

  for crows in blue sky over bloody grain.

  We fol
low Babble’s path from hinter’s springs,

  the river’s road to rock of carrion’s kings,

  an open tomb, a crowbar, on its way.

  there will be shadows in our world, I say,

  shades of the old world in a singer, myth and the archaic.

  We have raised Death to gaze down on the city’s arch mosaic.

  III

  Behold Eratta, Themes or Argot, our cosmopolis,

  city of Rhyme and Babble, our metropolis,

  modern monad of a meaningless Monopolis.

  Beneath the bone and silver disc of moon,

  the ivory towers in slunken streets are ruin,

  subsiding into sewers and subways, strewn

  with frescoes cracked by wall’s collapse

  into epodes and elegies. A stone collage,

  this is a cubist city which defies all maps.

  Survivors scrabble in the rabble of slab and stone,

  the clash of symbols all across an earthquake zone.

  Hands grub in rubble, shuffle pages of a broken tome.

  They seek to reconstruct a shattered holograph of haven’s halls,

  a hieroglyph inscribed in every fragment scattered in the fall.

  IV

  We walk an autumn, Rhyme and I, of writ and rite,

  of rusted artifacts of metaphor, arcane, a flight

  of ink, occult and orthodox. Adrift on scraps of light,

  these fragments, pages from a book of hours, flit yellowed white,

  these figments, factioned fictions, torn and thrown to hinter’s night.

  Amongst the flakes of scribble there is truth, I say, in sight.

  We sought to unencrypt our sylphs, to reinvert, reverse

  the transformations, the diaspora of sense dispersed,

  through word-holes in this discontinuum of life as verse.

  We mapped our afterworld in constructs of sensation,

  all its contents in new contexts, plans as revelations

  of our seven-souled consensual articulation.

  These grand designs mean nothing now as Rhyme and I both go

  down to the city of the word, Death walking with us after Babble’s flow.

  V

  Open the prison gates to gardens of the prester dawn,

  new keystones for philosophers in templates of delight.

  Open the sacred kingdom to us; open doors of sight.

  Come with us, Death and Babble, Rhyme and I. Come on.

  Come follow us into the black of blood,

  into the deep of steep and narrow ways.

  down from these fields of lost idyllic days,

  into a dark son’s desolation and the flood.

  Enter the hall, and hear a singer’s violent oath,

  his curse on those who feel no fire within,

  no red seed of the serpent shedding skin,