Fumaroles

By Anthony Arcuri

In this musing work, author Anthony Arcuri offers a unique literary composition by an irrepressible artist, who defiantly creates with disdain for the qualifications that would legitimize and commend his work.

Fumaroles offers a compilation of sonnet-length entries recorded in the fashion of a journal and divided into three books. Each entry may be read singly as a free-form sonnet or as sequential stanzas within the various cantos. The rich collection resolves into a proud monologue, a passionate, soul-quenching outpouring. As a dialogue between an individual and his race, based on immersion in the very spirit of the age, these verses seek to sort out beliefs in disarray and firm up the world view of the audience, either by harmonizing or clashing with those of Arcuri—and providing worthwhile benefit regardless.

Expressing a mystical love for all existence, this volume of epic poetry explores one man’s relationship with his race and the world around him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Mar 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483481074

Book preview

I

CANTO I

I speak my mind, ambitiously wishing

To aid humankind in the search for truths,

Leading to harmony and happiness;

While hopefully serving the solemn aim

Of the wildest, truest vision of earth,

In sensate and cognitive sanctity:

Abounding with interdependent life,

Plants and animals in marvelous array!

I know nothing ’s holier than living

And sharing the earth with all the creatures,

Livening her waters and lands and skies;

As our mystical ancestors once did,

Savagely part of the natural world.

My truth, and its frustration, I shall air.

Staring past death into eternity,

I bare my spirit, steady and serene.

Though our world represents a desert, where

Nothing good roots, even watered with tears,

Prayed over and sung to with perfect faith:

One can’t deny the self ’s sanguine nature,

And turn from it in disgust and despair.

Let the seeds of my words and deeds wither

To traceless dust, scattered across its dunes;

Their essence fulfilled a dreamer’s calling.

Outworn civilizations are to blame,

Perpetuating the world’s ancient wrongs!

Cursed be every name on the first king-list;

Loathed, the divine image first carved in stone!

Bound to a star, hear one who considers

Ours to be the highest form of being;

And here, the highest plane of existence.

In precious bodily life, surviving,

Mid infinite loneliness and darkness,

Life creates and sustains herself, in all

The divinity there is, here on earth;

Working with sublime equanimity.

Hear, lured to imagine what then follows:

Pure philanthropic reasoning opens

The way to see, and reach for our promise,

Toward the best left for all, yet possible.

Pause, for expansive suggestions to flow

In liberating floods, meet with our souls!

Borne in unfathomable circumstance,

Life’s dramas must be the supreme, cosmic

Action to highlight the stars’ theater.

Oh, can you not feel your noble spirits;

The dignity, conferred on flesh alone?

Unique to this blue globe, along her orb,

Throughout the heavens: behold sunlit life

Glorying in her miraculous world!

In my eyes, our beautiful, petite globe ’s

The veritable pride of the universe;

And all her beauty is ours while we breathe!

Within healthy minds: the value of earth’s

Achievements have fitting recognition,

And mortal selves ample compensation.

Think of the implications of my word;

My truth, wishing to uplift the lowly,

Deserving to see themselves framed all in

Beauty, and inexpressible meaning;

Against the reality of deep space,

Painted in the glory of cloud and mount,

Hill and plain, golden—fertile or barren.

My true intention ’s to do us justice;

Attest the majesty of the rayed self;

And praise those never before embraced

With lovely truths, and truly buoyed up.

I encourage heads, held high enough, to

Believe earth’s own beatific vision:

Graced panoramas, growing bright then dark.

Set in the wheel of the solar system,

Granting what we’ve learned of our sister realms,

There’s nothing more incredible than life!

And that’s posing something astonishing,

Given the nature of the universe, probed,

Where all sense is dumbfounded and amazed!

Set in swarms of competing multitudes,

No blissful self can make a difference, where

Advocating world peace and love ’s passé,

And enlightened outlooks naturally moot:

Given the established mindsets, ingrained

In propagandized and brainwashed peoples.

Afire with the unspeakable meaning

Of life, selves tend their wasted flames and die.

Hear my lamentation, and mourn with me.

Civilization ’s so corrupt and cruel:

No virgin generation can change it;

No age how golden, nor revolution

How gentle, can moderate its nature.

Not earth’s unsurpassable creation,

Nor ought in the heavens, can give it pause.

Inexorable, ruthless, ingenious,

Its terrible forces advance themselves,

Ubiquitous with all-disturbing reach.

It builds ever higher, and rushes ever

Faster, and populates ever denser;

Indulging gross excess and opulence,

With cost or consequence never an issue!

All that draws directly from the sun,

All that flows straight from natural sources;

All in perfect harmony with the seasons,

True to the wild, venerable heritage:

Let my heart hallow with its gracious flames,

In native compassion all-relating;

Expressing anguished solidarity

With all passing away, and pushed aside.

Each hears the firmament echoing cries.

The postmodern world is unstoppable:

Its industrial engines shake the earth,

And churn the oceans, and sully the winds;

And invade the secret provenance of life,

Naturally meant to remain undisturbed!

What were we born to? To what bear witness

Through motion pictures, then television?

First atomic, then nuclear weapons;

Top secret spy-planes, then spy-satellites?

Popular uprisings demanding change:

Brutishly quelled and assimilated?

To guess where these progressions lead, or how

Will they at some point end, I dare not think;

Nor thinking, comprehend the logic here!

Fate unfolds nothing I can relate to;

How alienation shrouds my spirit now!

The rise of the police state, that I faced,

Is the last thing I remember doing:

Protesting the entire postmodern world.

Is there gain, recording my highs and lows,

Sharing or exposing my naked self;

Being intimate with total strangers?

Is it relevant, or better, lovely?

Are my aesthetics and ethics any

Use, if they have rendered my life useless?

I can’t partake in this country’s ethos,

Or any others that you can think of.

My sympathies lie with the quick, dismissed,

Demoted to the dumb class of objects.

At death’s disposal, I stand adamant

In denunciation, with they condemned.

Does that example help others decide

Where boldly they should side? Oh, if only.

From the horse chariot to the jet fighter,

From the ziggurat to the skyscraper,

Nothing from the past, up to the present,

Can claim me: wild as my body’s atoms,

My beauty-loving, primordial core!

I fancy nothing after the Stone Age;

The rest are ages to falsehood’s liking.

The symmetries of the pristine eras

Hold sway over my imagination.

From the vaunted tombs, temples, obelisks,

Towers, domes, colossi and amphitheaters

Of antiquity; through the cathedrals,

To the latest bridge or dam: nothing grand

Is there to evoke my deepest stirrings!

Left free to meditation, I cast back,

Back to imaginings of the Ice Age:

Conjuring fleeting, flickering glimpses

Of advancing ice fields and glaciers;

To the immaculate dawn of pure time.

In that frame of mind, where all is pristine,

Luscious, wild, and animal habitat:

Not even a Stonehenge can impress me.

Then I feel my self exhilarated,

Liberated, returned to the true world,

Mid great mammals and birds in their glory!

Our world ’s the heritable, primeval

Realm, that cradled primitive people,

That left no record, but bequeathed our souls.

On my oath as a servant of beauty,

On my honor as a creature of love:

I see the most beauty in living things,

With their forms and methods of survival.

I feel the most love for the living earth:

All minerals, all plants and animals.

Fancy-free, I muse and opine at will,

With loose, spontaneous tongue, rambling.

I love the beautiful, living heavens,

Vital, and at one with our earth and moon.

On my troth as a self-perceived mystic,

Devoted to the mysteries of life,

And the mind’s visionary dimension:

I try to commune with our ideal spheres.

Oh, the world soul suffers such affliction,

I barely endure the acute awareness.

The mystic’s station likes the stargazer’s,

Their blissful impulses prompt quiet acts.

I open my self, and offer my soul

To the spirit of man, and the world soul,

And the deified spirit of life, summed.

I reach out in faith, in the dark or light,

Into mysticism’s nebulous sphere:

Summoning my soul, and those of the great,

Nowhere, yet invisibly all around;

Aching, offering to be a medium

For the secret keepers of blessedness;

Outstretched arms, naked bosom wide open.

Unspeaking, the spirits of loveliness

Intimate from their sacred dimension,

That’s everywhere at once, and nowhere, yet

Palpable to the mind and imminent:

Souls, naked, in throes of dulcet weeping,

Till all pain feels verified and assuaged.

We are not the masters of anything,

No, we’re just mere people of the cosmos;

Our ancestors, and their spirit-world, one;

All the dead together and imageless,

Source of genesis and paradise found;

Live universe of the mind and the soul.

We are the joy of the earth, or nothing:

Exalted of the ages—by vain chance!

CANTO II

Living with letters’ greatest voices helps;

From my own quaint and rustic library,

I take encouragement and instruction;

Thus the self-styled and self-willed satirist,

A rare reader ’s familiar with, exists.

Confident in obscurity’s comfort,

More out of shyness and humility

Than fear of exposure’s criticism:

Now I thrust poetic fancy to the hilt,

Striking fell blows, cutting villainy deep!

There is no role for life but the hero’s;

And in such a sophisticated world,

No better rule than that of the recluse:

Withholding affirmation of its ways!

A being whose spirit can’t be broken,

A body whose person is not for sale:

I deny the world. I work out of love,

And labor with pleasure, or balk the job.

My duty to integrity comes first.

Striving to be an honest man, what if

My duty to keep truthful relations:

Excludes interactions with deceivers,

Experience has shown are everywhere?

The sanctity of the self ’s inviolate,

Or the value of a life—mere illusion!

The will of a body is absolute,

Or lives mean what society ’s always

Insisted, reducing all things to slaves.

Life can’t accept irreparable harm,

Nor earth countenance human misery.

Chained to an existential treadmill, still

I seek to know the will of the true self,

And attempt to learn the will of nature,

And the worth to place upon my finding.

I need to know if there’s a practical

Way for humans to remake their model;

If there ’s any hope of a solution.

On I think for a terminus, eternal,

Desirable to each generation

Irregardless of their place in history,

Or the status of their native culture.

Aye, nothing less than the immortal crux.

The allurement from a dugout canoe,

Hewn from a single, traditional tree;

The enchantment to a basket of grass

And bark, painstakingly woven and designed;

A bow with arrows, a magic rattle,

A ceremonial mask: these make me hark

Back, causing pangs of envy and despair.

The art and craft of primitive peoples

Convince me of laudable beginnings;

Their artifacts sharpen my discontent,

And vindicate my dissatisfaction in,

And with, all things classical or modern;

Breathing life into my forlorn longing

For ways, for means, indisputably mild.

The Great Pyramid and Great Wall tell all;

Flags planted from the south pole to the moon,

Top every superhuman mountain peak!

Spinning prayer wheels, and votive candles

Flickering, round the clock, around the globe!

No hour without pews, kneelers, prayer rugs,

Serving blind faiths in kind! No minute’s peace

From ringing phones and buzzing computers:

For a hemisphere in any time zone!

The commercial hubs and holy cities

Never sleep! Earth’s skies never quiet down!

The tensed defense-systems never relax!

List, Greek temples and Roman aqueducts

Predict the inevitable eclipse!

Weighty, vehement voices are needed;

Eloquence, commensurate the crises

That need clarion calls ne’er before heard!

Would I had a muse to read me earth’s mind;

I grope so for language and images,

With nothing to impart them but guessing!

Always my inspiration ’s in common

Phenomena, from the public domaine,

Evident to all with whole skulls and souls.

Would there was an oracle to consult,

To confirm or deny one’s destiny;

But, alas, we’re all returned to our selves!

Quite confined to the limit of our wits

And the qualities with our characters.

Compelled to rally round a garden, racked:

Where all others failed, what ’re the chances

Of our endeavors winning laurel wreathes?

With all the heroes of myth and legend

For your leaders, generals, and captains:

Field an army of John Muir clones, arrayed

Against the invaders with ghostly fright,

And still you’d be overmatched by the foe!

Cohorts, ours is a suicide mission,

Dedicated to life’s supreme values,

Spurred by the imperative of honor!

Our bitter solace is in knowing that

Our martyrdom will leave the earth in tears,

Or on the verge for as long as she lives.

Peaceable, questioning agents of change,

Who made native beauty an afterthought,

Orchestrating the false standards in place,

Where the obscene passes for decorum

And the grotesque for classical beauty?

Is it then a segment of society

Or society itself that does these things?

Does the fault name one or many nations?

By our asking and demanding answers,

We’re making a difference by dint of will.

What keeps this darkness no torch can illume,

Where evil goes about destroying good?

Where shall civilization find answers

To these questions of the world’s salvation?

One could think glory first points to the sun.

You could think glories pertain to the earth,

And magnify earth, air, fire, and water.

Thinking all glory emanates from life,

I’d dwell on the glory that’s consciousness,

In a subsistent being, surviving.

Glory be to life, in the lowest form,

As in the highest intellect alive;

I don’t know to speculate beyond that,

Beyond what one understands as a man;

Where sensibilia evidences no God,

Nor men through their faculties and habits.

Passed need to embellish existence, I

Hold glory be to earth and life’s great brood!

CANTO III

The sweet moods of a peaceful, grateful soul

Flow regularly throughout their body.

Liberated from orthodox constraints,

The free-thinker explores the mystic vein;

Eased, they enjoy the sane ideation

Of free and fortunate human beings.

Having our basic needs met, we move on

To emotional and spiritual needs.

State-sanctioned cults and traditions aside,

We rejoice to fate unfolding in us:

Self ’s blessed identify with everyone

And everything to this isolate world;

That renders earth the oasis of life,

Mind’s mirage mid the cosmic desertscape!

As life ’s the top anomaly in space,

Free-floating happiness and much goodwill

Top the attributes of rare character,

Unfettered from normal inhibitions

And conventional wisdom’s reactions.

There’s truest piety and saintliness:

Empathizing with all creation’s pain,

Transcending individual selfishness;

To be compassed by universal joys,

Common to the new cosmopolitan:

Who’d prove a friend or advocate for each

Specimen of life, plant and animal.

The good of the whole earth is the issue;

The continuance of all that exists.

Humanists of every stripe and degree,

With principles answering the world’s need,

We depend on our enemies for life

And freedoms, beholding to their system;

And therefore by irony, live tormented.

The supreme antagonist of all time,

As Satan to God, now is man to life.

Idealists, do-gooders, peacemakers, torn,

Where do we, as part of humanity,

Turn? How great, in truth, is our dishonor?

How deep within and dark runs our disgrace?

All our noble sentiments are rubbish;

Our own feeble gestures belittle us;

We’re winnowed away like chaff in the wind.

Defenders of the light-driven creation,

As the brightest objects in the heavens,

That once were man’s holy hierarchy:

So you’re the brightest of earthly bodies

In the worldwide ranks of luminaries.

Yet, torchbearers of the first-magnitude,

Lacking all-patient love, you’d surely crack:

Clay stalwarts of nonviolent campaigns to

Raise awareness of life’s overarching

Business. Improve on saints, dealing in depth

With the evils plaguing our earth; fearing

Folk everywhere lack the lucid, moral

Sight and political will to face them:

For urgent needs are all they can cope with.

Proclaimers of water-sourced paradise,

In your struggle, remember to practice

Life’s equanimity; and on aspire

To practice sunlight’s objectivity.

Stand for the imitation of mother

Earth, in impartial loving and giving.

Imagine our hearts likened to the globe’s,

For ours are, in their idolizing life,

As unreachable and otherworldly—

Generating vibrations that shield the world.

Praise the crust that became the gardens;

Proclaim all that vegetates on the earth;

All the elements of the universe

Massed here, in the fiery engine of life!

In the spirit of the times and our sphere,

The nature lover rebukes his fellows:

Turn in your skeletons, he orders them,

"Get down with the dead. Be gone from all light.

Vanish from all air and its luxuries!

Spare paradise your blind indifference;

End the desecrations and blasphemies:

You who sit enraptured through a movie,

But never sit or stand through a sunrise;

You who attend concerts in ecstasies,

And never a sunset through all its phases.

What you do for petty conveniences:

Severs regal creatures from their domaines,

In the mold of the worst to man’s nature!"

By the elements of the universe,

Massed here, as only science can recount,

Constituting our planet and prize moon:

We swear to the absolute perfection

Of what has evolved here, excepting man.

Man would deny evolution, and strives

To undo it. Man strains to take control;

And worn earth is showing the ill effects:

Undisputed greatness, nature divine,

All tired and tested, her laws and customs,

Her very will got from the womb of time!

By the elements of our flesh and blood,

We know we are obliged to the whole earth,

And the great processes, science explains.

I’d swear I am a son of nature, and

Not of man! Lost, as I am, from the state

Of nature I am predisposed to know,

With the normal rage of a man’s lifetime

Doubled, I crumple over in seizures

Of insoluble troubles. Sore vexed, still

My conscience speaks, "Deny no pain in you,

Or in others, or in the world at large.

Nor turn a blind eye on the evil afoot,

At work on every path, in every street,

Indeed in every corner of the world.

Where two or more people mingle, there is

The condition right for wicked business.

Wretch, you are, but not a bloody liar!"

No man ever cherished innocence more

Than I have, with never a moment’s lapse.

No woman ever grieved the loss of it,

More than me, for whom it is an illness,

Ever secret, without treatments or cures;

A burden so primal and personal:

It’s carried in the deepest recesses

Of one’s mind and being, where traits are lodged.

This complex comes with the antiquity

Of my soul, through which I’m oft reminded:

"Bemoan the loss of human innocence,

And bewail that led to earth’s loss of her’s;

Hoot or howl aggrieved with night’s haunters, and

Vigils keep each day for the baleful loss."

‘Tis time, as evinced by global accounts.

Hark, great masses to my fomentation;

Your torchbearer ’s found his clarion voice.

Your hesitant prophet has hit his stride:

Prophecy to incite revolutions,

Total, global, violent revolution;

Violent in terms of extreme happenings,

Upheavals, downfalls, and trial beginnings,

As old orders crash and fields are leveled!

Decency’s frustration boils hotter,

Arousing her charges to open revolt

Against the great system—in its ministers

And gloating vassals, our miseries fatten!

‘Tis time, as evinced by global omens.

Continue to confront the status quo,

At all costs! Generations, in a row,

Line up for marches and demonstrations.

Face the perpetual-motion-machine;

Impervious to attack, attack it!

Resist the stark tyranny that it exerts

Over a defenseless natural world,

And its naturally vulnerable publics.

Strain the unbreakable strangleholds it

Enjoys applying in domination;

With the resolve of fighters, transfixed by

Their vision of victory, and the triumphs

To follow. New weapons forge, and press on

With shrewder tactics and strange stratagems!

Systemic evils are the enemies;

The repetition of forced outrages,

Cruel to the masses of needy people

As they are the others of earth’s great zoo!

The ironclad system for creating wealth

Is invincible, at this point in time.

It’s plastic and fickle enough to roll

Back and forth, over every obstacle

Nature or rebellion sets before it!

Self-perpetuating, its regency

Rivals that of sun and earth’s true regime.

Yet, having said this, I hasten to add

That nothing manmade can outlive change,

Or outlast mankind’s moral impetus!

The perpetual-motion-machine-state

Makes automatons and robots of us;

And only the gullible can stomach it.

The ziggurats of Sumer and Akkad

Are here in the world’s financial buildings;

Offering palm food and wine to the gods,

Their managers and brokers—the priesthoods;

And masses still bask in their vainglory.

The Babylonian sundial casts a long shadow.

The arc of the Fertile Crescent rings us.

Well the inborn pluck and hope of the slave

Are still with us! Oh, take heart, good people,

The white magic of writing and music

Are with us; and our outstanding causes!

Police-menaced people, look to the plebs

Of republican Rome! Mark their precedent,

Dealing with the state’s haughty patricians;

When they dared mete out flagrant tyrannies.

Antagonized peoples, version a brave

Mobilization, equal their shrewd scheme!

Aren’t you, surveilled commoners, modern plebs

Ripe for your own secessio plebis?

Aren’t your restless, native ranks disposed to

Withdraw from the city ruling the world,

For hope’s own metaphoric Mons Sacer:

There to remain till the elites relent,

Submitting to demands for a just world

And a sacrosanct peace with mother earth?

People, let’s put ourselves in perspective,

A spatial perspective—the times behoove.

Ponder with me the following question:

Will Homo sapiens mark even one

Loop around our barred spiral galaxy?

Will mankind even last one cosmic year

As king of the earth’s animal kingdom?

People, set in black space your lives on earth.

With the rudest conceptions of near space,

And dilating visions that they yield:

We have the proper perspective we need.

Watch our lovely moon seemingly play tag

With the sun; its image rounding the globe ’s

The perfect, tangible touchstone for this!

CANTO IV

Faith is a work of art. For real worship

Take in, in grateful wonder, all what’s ours,

Through intelligence and understanding.

As the planet spins in and out of light

And its creatures slip in and out of sleep,

The life, in each, primitive and private:

Turn and return to sympathy with all

Hidden and secret, as nature would have it.

Obvious to moderns of honest bent:

The generational life of species,

Knitted together, flesh the proper god,

To quench our desires and requite our souls.

Men once acknowledged this and must again;

Who alone recognize the Milky Way!

Life ’s the vessel of holiness itself;

Mortality its very blessed spring.

On worship’s purpose, finely refocused,

The incalculable stakes of our times hinge;

As life, unawares, keeps creating true,

Unknowing of anything but blessing;

Enduring the boiling crowds at mischief,

Spoilt or starved, numbering in the billions,

Unconscious of wilderness and wildlife.

World religions and mighty nations hark

Not to sensitive minds nor nature’s voice.

The mystical body of life ’s a-dream,

At the mercy of Homo sapiens,

Greatest and gravest of mighty beings.

Abase yourselves from assumed godlikeness.

Disabuse yourselves of stock illusions

That insult every clear-thinking person:

Proud to be a beast, shamed to be a man

Putting on immortal airs! Hear me rail.

Ignorance and superstition hold sway.

Abrogate those institutions at fault

For breeding such fatuous arrogance

And flattery. Misguided people massed

In hostile factions, pillared by customs,

Shocking as the latest global census:

Furnish armies that wage war for blind faith,

Beguiled by time-honored false assumptions,

All-harmful, all-threatening to life itself!

Fallacy will see they fall; felony,

They earn their death, after injuring life

Beyond the pale of natural justice!

The rewards of madness are illusory;

And temporary advantages backlash,

When they’re at the expense of elements:

Disturbed from fixed sates of naturalness,

Under the offices of defilement

And globe-circulating pollution! Then

As these ghastly assertions ring too true,

People will plead their case to earth too late;

And realize the fruition of hubris:

Haughtily riding roughshod over calm

And peace and the natural world’s largess.

Pathos is all there is to prophesy.

Mankind’s stark condition omens itself,

And dark indeed are the birds’ auspices.

Irony stalks. Bereavement lurks. Cruel chagrin

Takes masses captive. Calamity claims

Ascendancy over human affairs,

That profited by lying and cheating.

Pious the while, the poor folk were bled dry:

The pompous elite resplendently blazed,

Hallowed with blessings, heralded holy.

Now religion unmasks, flaunting his skull.

Now the Grim Reaper turns on his master.

The seas reach out for the souls of men:

The lands poise to grip and pull asunder!

Greed is the crowned king of humanity;

For whom they invented the compass and

Sextant, to map the great globe for rapine;

For whom, in fact, they have done every deed

Of genius from time immemorial;

Millennia, pleasing his surrogates,

Holding it in their own best self-interests,

Selling out the essential’s of virtue.

These are the signs of the last days, not those

Of Revelation’s hackneyed lunacy!

Nature’s last sealed secret shall be opened,

And the mysteries of life stolen for evil

By modern science, empowering elites

To usurp dominion, darkening light!

There’s the natural world, in all directions,

Extending endlessly, forever void

Of any and all human projections;

Immaculate, star-cleansed, pristine inane

On inane stretching on, deserting light.

To this rule, I grant but one exception,

Which is the subjective valuation

And validation of universal

Beauty: responded to with emotion

Imbued with sublime bliss, in its vision

Believing the attribute absolute,

Part of the stuff existence is formed of;

Waxing poetical with eulogies

Of beauty, the element of excellence!

Arctic circles, equatorial zones,

Between the poles of the bears and penguins:

The concept of a lord has now no place

Beyond the world of superstitious fools.

Outside their twisted spheres of influence:

There is only infinite peace and space,

Without the presence of beings,

Surrounding our spontaneous planet,

With its creation, time’s most surprising!

The magical flight of the arctic tern,

The placid migrations of the great whales:

Nowise infer some nigh lord’s existence;

Nothing about the world of the oceans,

Bulging up when they pass under the moon.

One suggests the advise he gives himself.

Believe your eyes, seeing life ’s on her own;

Mind’s speculation that earth ’s all alone.

Believe in your senses, trust in your mind;

Support what their observations report.

Unless self-evident under scrutiny,

Or obvious through force of argument:

Remain skeptical. Honor your instincts.

Accept your separateness, sweet entity;

Revere consciousness of your circumstance:

Born alone, to grow, age, and die lonely;

Not guardian angel, daemon, soulmate,

To visit the self ’s dark, cheerless sanctum;

Keenly conscious of stern, unfolding fate.

Elusive as a firm plan for world peace,

And as impossible to implement,

Reject the dissolution of the dream

Of a period of human fulfillment,

Premised on the goodness of humankind.

Join me, disputing every obstacle.

Rediscovery of the natural balance

Between humans and their competitors,

Could flow in floods of reawakening.

Why, violence could be put on trial, exposed,

Denounced, condemned, and so executed:

In the last, final violent act of man!

Every haunting specter confronting man,

The whole horrid lot, are conquerable!

If nihilism ’s the first daunting step

To take, on the way to change, so be it!

Extreme measures are necessary now

To meet the dire challenges of our time;

They beggar our powers of expression,

And raise a terrifying glass before

The races, to behold their real likeness.

Facing these Medusa-like images,

Remember we’ve apt poetic recourse;

In private interludes, pat safe haven.

We can retreat within the knowledge that

Life’s own unidentifiable spirit:

Sings for the unison of all species,

And teaches the song to those who’ll listen.

Unhand the destiny of life on earth!

In the name of the sun, you’re commanded.

Release earth and her creatures from bondage!

In the name of life and the name of death:

You’re ordered to humble yourselves, and beg

Prostrate before the spirits of the dead,

To take pity on such wicked wretches,

And to intercede on your behalf for

The mystery-spirits to show their mercy!

Though there can be no hope of atonement,

Desist from vicious works and confess all:

Despite your advantages of reason,

And tender guidance from understanding:

You raped beauty and plundered paradise!

I speak to might from my intrepid trance,

And to all the frightful issues swirling:

Unintimidated by you, drab nations,

Shamelessly arrayed in treacherous blocks.

Damn cowing authority and power!

Damn tyranny hidden behind stone facades,

And overbearing unflappability!

Your pedigrees not worth one honeybee’s!

The devil take your pomp and circumstance,

Your rigged economies, your war machines!

More and more men conduct the earth’s business,

Confronting your fiendish intransigence;

Wallowing with you bores, in your wastelands,

We throw your impudence in your faces!

Does a god own the galaxies like fleets

Of ships once held by a temporal king?

Guide them as a helmsman steers a vessel?

Ocean-wild, an impersonal cosmos

Tells men such regal mastery ’s unsought by

Infinite space; that such a deity

Is undreamed of by eternity; more,

That a creating and controlling force

Is definitely unsought, unmeant,

Undreamed and unknown either to light or dark.

Lo, the great universe is free-wheeling!

To this earth-mariner on watch at night:

The giant realty of the galaxies

Is no throne’s property or wealth or art.

Would your order unwittingly enrich

Impoverished wastes of myriads of worlds,

Naturally infertile from inception?

For that sorrow shall be the consequence

Of your tired populations functioning,

In accordance with the old projections

Of dullish fools, speculating for them;

Providing men rationales for blunders.

If gross habit keeps you taking orders

From dimwits, whose philosophies deny

The essential insights to a proper

Understanding of terrestrial life:

That arch-tragedy’s outcome ’s insured,

Adding an extinguished world to the dead!

Shame, shock, horrors! What! is life to commit

Suicide by man? Is life doomed to die

For the success of its favored primates?

Shall the species entrusted with special

Powers and secrets: turn them perversely

Into the means for mass devastations

And extinctions? Is unparagoned earth

Then the stage for the gravest, capital

Crimes ever anywhere to be conceived?

High apex of mammal development,

The nature to pleasure in divine style,

How could the creature to be granted boons

And allowed the privileges man’s enjoyed:

Evolve into the source of earth’s demise?

Long ago I outgrew my naive phase,

Eyeing our human condition: first set

In the pageantry of the four seasons,

Beginning a wide-eyed, highland-town boy;

And never stopping since, to faithfully,

Passionately and affectionately observe

The states of being, shared by the sexes.

From my earliest memories, I felt,

And grew to think our serious problems

Sued to be addressed with loving-kindness.

To this elder moment, I gray convinced

I got to the heart and comprehended:

The prize realization, so profound

And simple it’s summarily pooh-poohed.

Silencers of springtide’s caroling birds,

You can not muzzle me, their champion;

I live within the framework of your law,

While I thrive within their value system:

A worshiper of life’s spirit, with heart

Ablaze with ardor and devotion

For his own and every other species,

All following the great world’s rituals.

As a poet, my ideal is to lovingly

Let signature phrases declare life’s praise;

As a knight, I champion all earth’s seeds.

The life to the earth is the ideal of life;

So then should the affairs of men be deemed,

To circumstances, in their ideal form.

Natural, unavoidable suffering ’s bad

And sad, but that due to cruelty ’s the worst

And the saddest of all earthly suffering.

Cruelty, of the oldest established creeds,

Should be among the first abolished.

The enduring tear-thirsty, bloodthirsty

Abomination of rampant cruelty:

It creeps, complexly in every degree,

Exploiting the subtlety of our nerves;

Or strikes nakedly brazen and brutal.

Right repugnant to human decency,

How ’s the cult of cruelty tolerated?

Good and ill inhabit the same persons;

Sin and virtue, societies the same.

Whose culture made the full moon meaningless;

Its luminescence a