"Lunar Baedecker" by Mina Loy

Lunar Baedecker
by Mina Loy

The entire text of Lunar Baedecker has appeared in print only once. Originally published in 1923 (Paris: Contact Editions), it contained the following poems:

Poems 1921-1922

Lunar Baedeker

Apology of Genius

Joyce's Ulysses

English Rose

Crab-Angel

Der Blinde Junge

Ignoramus

Poe

Brancusi's Golden Bird

"The Starry Sky" of Wyndham Lewis

O Hell

and

Poems 1914-1915

Love Songs I-XIII

Café du Néant

Magasins Du Louvre

Italian Pictures

July in Vallambrosa

The Costa San Gorgio

Costa Magic

Sketch of a Man on a Platform

Parturition

Only selected poems from Lunar Baedecker appeared in the 1958 publication of Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables, and since then, The Last Lunar Baedeker (1982) collects and reorganizes Loy's entire body of poetry. The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996) does not contain all the original Baedecker poems, nor does it adhere to the original order. It is for these reasons that the entire original text of Lunar Baedecker now follows, recreated to the best of my ability and with the grateful acknowledgment of Roger L. Conover's skillful editing of The Last Lunar Baedeker and The Lost Lunar Baedeker, from which these poems are compiled.

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris is livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

Stellectric signs

WING SHOWS ON STARWAY
ZODIAC CAROUSEL

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews
in the museums of the moon

NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS
CRYSTAL CONCUBINE

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

Apology of Genius

Ostracized as we are with God The watchers of the civilized wastes reverse their signals on our track Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores unknowing how perturbing lights our spirit on the passion of Man until you turn on us your smooth fools' faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries We are the sacerdotal clowns who feed upon the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty Our wills are formed by curious disciplines beyond your laws You may give birth to us or marry us the chances of your flesh are not our destiny -- The cuirass of the soul still shines -- And we are unaware if you confuse such brief corrosion with possession In the raw caverns of the Increate we forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewelry of the Universe -- The Beautiful -- While to your eyes A delicate crop of criminal mystic immortelles stands to the censor's scythe

Joyce's Ulysses

The Normal Monster
sings in the Green Sahara

The voice and offal
of the image of God

make Celtic noises
in these lyrical hells

Hurricanes
of reasoned musics
reap the uncensored earth

The loquent consciousness
of living things
pours in torrential languages

The elderly colloquists
the Spirit and the Flesh
are out of tongue

The Spirit
is impaled upon the phallus

Phoenix
of Irish fires
lighten the Occident

with Ireland's wings
flap pandemoniums
of Olympian prose

and satinize
the imperial Rose
of Gaelic perfumes --
England
the sadistic mother
embraces Erin

Master
of meteoric idiom
present

The word made flesh
and feeding upon itself
with erudite fangs
The sanguine
introspection of the womb

Don Juan
of Judea
upon a pilgrimage
to the Libido

The press
purring
its lullabies to sanity

Christ capitalized
scourging
incontrite usurers of destiny
in hole and corner temples

And hang
The soul's advertisements
outside the ecclesiast's Zoo

A gravid day
spawns
gutteral gargoyles
upon the Tower of Babel

Empyrean emporium
where the
rejector-recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub rosa

English Rose

Early English everlasting
quadrate Rose
paradox-Imperial
trimmed with some travestied flesh
tinted with bloodless duties dewed
with Lipton's teas
and grimed with crack-packed
herd-housing
petalling
the prim gilt
penetralia
of a luster-scioned
core-crown

Rose of arrested impulses
self-pruned
of the primordial attributes
a tepid heart inhibiting
with tactful terrorism
the Blossom Populous
to mystic incest with its ancestry
establishing
by the divine right of self-assertion
the post-conceptual
virginity of Nature

wiping
its pink paralysis
A World-Blush
glowing from
a never-setting-sun
Conservative Rose
storage
of British Empire-made pot-pourri
of dry dead men making a sweetened smell
among a shrivelled collectivity

Which august dust
stirred by
the trouser-striped prongs of statesmanship
(whenever politic)
rises upon the puff of press alarum
and whirling itself
deliriously around the unseen
Bolshevik subsides
in ashy circularity
"a wreath" upon the unknown
soldier's grave

And Jehovah strikes --
through the fetish
of the island hedged --
Exodus
who on his holiday
(induced
by the insidious pink
of Albion's ideal)
is looking for a rose

And the rose
rises
from the green
of a green lane
rosily-stubborn
and robustly round

Under a pink print
sunbonnet
the village maid
scowls at the heathen

Albion
in female form
salutes the alien Exodus

staring so hard --
warms his nostalgia
on her belligerent innocence

The maidenhead
drooping her lid
and pouting her breast

forewarns
his amity

Amorphous meeting
in the month of May

This Hebrew
culled by Cupid on a thorn
of the rose
lays siege
to the thick hedgerows
where she blows
on Christian Sundays

She
simpering in her
ideological pink
He
loaded with Mosaic
passions that amass
like money

implores her to take pity upon him
and come and be a "Lady in the City"

Maiden emotions
breed
on leaves of novels
where anatomical man
has no notion
of offering other than the bended knee
to femininity

and purity
passes in pleasant ways
as the cows graze

For in those days
when Exodus courted the rose
literature was supposed to elevate us

So the maid with puffy
bosom where Jerusalem
dreams to ease
his head of calculations
in the Zero of ecstasy
and a little huffy
bristles with chastity

For this is the last Judgment
when Jehovah
roars "Open your mouth!
and I will tell you what you have been reading"

Exodus had been reading
Proverbs
making sharp distinction
between the harlot
and the Hausfrau arraying
her offspring in scarlet
approving
such as garner good advice like grain
and such as know enough
to come in from the rain

The would-be
secessionist from Israel's etiquette
(shielding pliant Jewesses from shame
less glances
and the giving
of just percentages
to matrimonial intermediaries)
is spiritually intrigued
by the Anglo-Saxon phenomenon
of Virginity
delightfully
on its own defensive!

This pouting
pearl beyond price
flouts
the male pretentions
to its impervious surface

Alice the gentile
Exodus the Jew
after a few
feverish tiffs
and reparations
chiefly conveyed in exclamations --
a means of expression
modified by lack of experience --
unite their variance
in marriage

Exodus
Oriental
mad to melt
with something softer than himself
clasps with soothing pledges
his wild rose of the hedges

While she
expecting
the presented knee
of chivalry
repels
the sub-umbilical mystery
of his husbandry
hysterically

His passionate-anticipation
of warming in his arms
his rose to a maturer coloration
which was all of aspiration
the grating upon civilization
of his sensitive organism
had left him

splinters upon an adamsite
opposition
of nerves like stalactites

This dying chastity
had rendered up no soul yet they pursued their conjugal
dilemmas as is usual
with people
who know not what they do
but know that what they do
is not illegal

Deep in the névrose
night he
peruses his body
divested of its upholstery
firmly insensitive
in mimicry
of its hypothetical model --
a petal
of the English rose
an abstracted Ada
in myopic contemplation
of the incontemplatable
compound rosette
of peerless negations

That like other Gods
has never appeared
leaving itself to be inferred
Whereof
it is not seemly
that the one petal
shall apprehend
of the other petals
their conformity

For of this Rose
wherever it blows
it is certain that an impenetrable pink curtain
hangs between it and itself
and in metaphysical vagrance
it passes beyond the ken
of men unless
possessed
of exorbitant incomes
And Then --
merely indicating its presence
by an exotic fragrance

A rose --
that like religions
before
becoming amateur --
enwraps itself
in esoteric
and exoteric
dimensions:
the official
and inofficial
social morale
The outer
classes
accepting the official
of the inner
as a plausible
gymnastic
for disciplining the inofficial
"flesh and devil"
to the ap parent impecca bility
of the English

And for the Empire
what form could be superior
to the superimposed
slivers
of the rose?

The best
is this compressed
all round-and-about
itself conformation
never letting out
subliminal infection
from hiatuses
in its sub-roseal skeleton

Its petals hung
with tongues that under the supervision
of the Board of Education
may never sing in concert --
for some
singing h
flat and some
h sharp 'The Arch
angels sing H'

There reigns a disproportionate
dis'armony
in the English Hanthem
And for further information
re the Rose --
and what it does to the nose
while smelling it

See Punch

Crab-Angel

An atomic sprite
perched on a polished
monster-stallion
reigns over Ringling's revolving
trinity of circus attractions

Something the contour
of a captured crab
waving its useless pearly claws

From a squat body
pigmy arms
and bowlegs
with their baroque calves
curve in a bi-circular attitude
to a ballerina's ecstasy

An effigy of Christmas Eves
smile-cast among chrysanthemum curls
it seems a sugar angel --
while from a rose-flecked ruff of gauze
its manly legs
stamp on the vast rump of the horse

An irridescent speck
dripped from a rainbow
onto an ebony cloud

Crab-Angel I christen you
miniken of masquerade sex

Helen of Lilliput?
Hercules in a powder puff?

2. (Song)

"Had you been born
in regions of the Unicorn
To balance on his ivory horn
perhaps"
"Per Bacco! 'Tis an idiot dwarf
hooked to a wire to make him jump"

Automaton bareback rider
the circus-master
jerks
your invisible pendulence
from an overhead pulley
to your illusory
leaps in up-a-loft

signs
the horse
racing the orchestra
in rushing show
throw
his whimsy wire-hung dominator

to dart
through circus skies of arc-lit dust
Crab-Angel like a swimming star

clutching the tail end of the Chimera
An aerial acrobat
floats on the coiling lightning
of the whirligig

lifts
to the elated symmetry of Flight

A startled rose
whirls in the chaos of the hoofs

The jeering jangling
jazz
crashes to silence

The dwarf
subsides like an ironic sigh
to the soft earth
and ploughs
his bowlegged way
laboriously towards the exit
waving a yellow farewell with his perruque

Der Blinde Junge

The dam Bellona
littered
her eyeless offspring
Kriegsopfer
upon the pavements of Vienna

Sparkling precipitate
the spectral day
involves
the visionless obstacle

this slow blind face
pushing its virginal nonentity
against the light

Pure purposeless eremite
of centripetal sentience

Upon the carnose horologe of the ego
the vibrant tendon index moves not

since the black lightening desecrated
the retinal altar

Void and extinct
this planet of the soul
strains from the craving throat
in static flight upslanting

A downy youth's snout
nozzling the sun
drowned in dumfounded instinct

Listen!
illuminati of the coloured earth
How this expressionless "thing"
blows out damnation and concussive dark

Upon a mouth-organ

Ignoramus

Shut it up

Sing silence
To destiny
Give half-a-crown
To a magician
Half a glance
To window-eclipse
And count the glumes
Of your day's bargaining
Lying
In the lining
Of your pocket
While compromising
Between the perpendicular and horizontal
Some other tramp
Leans against
The night-nursery of trams

Puffs of black night
Quiver the neck
Of the Clown of Fortune
Dribble out of his trouser-ends
In dust-to-dust
Till cock-kingdom-come-crow
You can hear the heart-beating
Accoupling
of the masculine and feminine
Universal principles
Mating
And the martyrdom of morning
Caged with the love of houseflies
The avidity of youth
And incommensuration.

Day-spring
Bursting on repetition
"My friend the Sun
You have probably met before"
Or breakfasting on rain
You hurry
To interpolate
The over-growth
Of vegetation
With a walking-stick

Or smear a friend
With a greasy residuum
From boiling your soul down
You can walk to Empyrean to-gether
Under the same
Oil-silk umbrella

"I must have you
Count stars for me
Out of their numeral excess
Please keep the brightest
For the last

Poe

a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights

sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights

where frozen nightingales in ilex aisles
sing burial rites

Brancusi's Golden Bird

The toy
become the aesthetic archetype

As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal

A naked orientation
unwinged unplumed
the ultimate rhythm
has lopped the extremities
of crest and claw
from
the nucleus of flight

The absolute act
of art
conformed
to continent sculpture
-- bare as the brow of Osiris --
this breast of revelation

an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames
in labyrinths of reflections

This gong
of polished hyperaesthesia
shrills with brass as the aggressive light
strikes
its significance
The immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence

"The Starry Sky" of Wyndham Lewis

who raised
these rocks of human mist

pyramidical survivors
in the cyclorama of space

In the
austere theatre of the Infinite
the ghosts of the stars
perform the "Presence"

Their celibate shadows
fall
upon the aged radiance
of suns and moons

----- The nerves of Heaven
flinching
from the antennae
of the intellect
----- the rays
that pierce
the nocturnal heart
The airy eyes of angels
the sublime
experiment in pointillism
faded away

The celestial conservatories
blooming with light
are all blown out

Enviable immigrants
into the pure dimension
immune serene
devourers of the morning stars of Job

Jehovah's seven days
err in your silent entrails
of geometric Chimeras

The Nirvanic snows
drift ----- ----- -----
to sky worn images

O Hell

To clear the drifts of spring
Of our forbears' excrements
And bury the subconscious archives
Under unaffected flowers

Indeed --
Our person is a covered entrance to infinity
Choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods
Caress the sanctity of Adolescence
In the shaft to the sun

Love Songs

Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass.

At your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands

III

Night
Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares
---------------------------------------------
Noon
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun

Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude

Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon

Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiences
Begging dorsal vertebrae

Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blur
Anything
Than to seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other

Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn

Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern

VII

Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom's eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair

One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose's wings

But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
-- Sweeping the brood clean out

VIII

Midnight empties the street
--- --- --- To the left a boy
--- One wing has been washed in rain
The other will never be clean any more ---
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
--- The poor can't wash in hot water ---
And I don't know which turning to take ---

We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily-news
Printed in blood on its wings

In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Foetal buffoons
Caught tricks
--- --- --- --- ---
From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
--- --- --- ---
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And most of Nature is green
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager's revival
And flowered flummery
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun

XII

Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes

We sidle up
To Nature
--- --- --- that irate pornographist

XIII

The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching --- --- --- --- ------ --- ---

Café du Néant

Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally
Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant
Leaning to the breath of baited bodies
Like young poplars fringing the Loire

Eyes that are full of love
And eyes that are full of kohl
Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente
Trailing the rest of the animal behind them
Telling of tales without words
And lies of no consequence
One way or another

The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black
To black cravat
To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat
What color could have been your bodies
When last you put them away

Nostalgic youth
Holding your mistress's pricked finger
In the indifferent flame of the taper
Synthetic symbol of LIFE
In this factitious chamber of DEATH
The woman
As usual
Is smiling as bravely
As it is given to her to be brave

While the brandy cherries
In winking glasses
Are decomposing
Harmoniously
With the flesh of spectators
And at a given spot
There is one
Who
Having the concentric lighting focussed precisely upon her
Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction
Yet there are cabs outside the door.

Magasins du Louvre

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass

Long lines of boxes
Of dolls
Propped against banisters
Walls and pillars
Huddled on shelves
And composite babies with arms extended
Hang from the ceiling
Beckoning
Smiling
In a profound silence
Which the shop walker left trailing behind him
When he ambled to the further end of the gallery
To annoy the shop-girl

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass
They alone have the effrontery to
Stare through the human soul
Seeing nothing
Between parted fringes
One cocotte wears a bowler hat and a sham camellia
And one an iridescent boa
For there are two of them
Passing
And the solicitous mouth of one is straight
The other curved to a static smile
They see the dolls
And for a moment their eyes relax
To a flicker of elements unconditionally primeval
And now averted
Seek each other's surreptitiously
To know if the other has seen
While mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern of the
carpet
As eyes are apt to be
In their shame
Having surprised a gesture that is ultimately intimate

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass.

Italian Pictures

July in Vallombrosa

Old lady sitting still
Pine trees standing quite still
Sisters of mercy whispering
Oust the Dryad

O consecration of forest
To the uneventful

I cannot imagine anything
Less disputably respectable
Than prolonged invalidism in Italy
At the beck
Of a British practitioner

Of all permissible pastimes
Attendant upon chastity
The one with which you can most efficiently insult
Life
Is your hobby of collecting death-beds
Blue Nun

So wrap the body in flannel and wool
Of superior quality from the Anglo-American
Until that ineffable moment
When Rigor Mortis
Divests it of its innate impurity

While round the hotel
Wanton Italian matrons
Discuss the better business of bed-linen
To regular puncture of needles

The old lady has a daughter
Who has been spent
In chasing moments from one room to another
When the essence of an hour
Was in its passing
With the passionate breath
Of the bronchitis-kettle
And her last little lust
Lost itself in a saucer of gruel

But all this moribund stuff
Is not wasted
For there is always Nature
So its expensive upkeep
Goes to support
The loves
Of head-waiters

The Costa San Giorgio

We English make a tepid blot
On the messiness
Of the passionate Italian life-traffic
Throbbing the street up steep
Up up to the porta
Culminating
In the stained frescoe of the dragon-slayer

The hips of women sway
Among the crawling children they produce
And the church hits the barracks
Where
The greyness of marching men
Falls through the greyness of stone
Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
BROKEN HEADS and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see
ourselves
Shaving
ICE CREAM
Licking is larger than mouths
Boots than feet
Slip Slap and the string dragging
And the angle of the sun
Cuts the whole lot in half

And warms the folded hands
Of a consumptive
Left outside her chair is broken
And she wonders how we feel
For we walk very quickly
The noonday cannon
Having scattered the neighbour's pigeons

The smell of small cooking
From luckier houses
Is cruel to the maimed cat
Hiding
Among the carpenter's shavings
From three boys
--- One holding a bar ---
Who nevertheless
Born of human parents
Cry when locked in the dark

Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street

Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion

For there is little to do
The false pillow-spreads
Hugely initialed
Already adjusted
On matrimonial beds
And the glint on the china virgin
Consummately dusted

Having been thrown
Anything or something
That might have contaminated intimacy
OUT
Onto the middle of the street

Costa Magic

Her father
Indisposed to her marriage
And a rabid man at that
My most sympathetic daughter
Make yourself a conception
As large as this one
Here
But with yellow hair

From the house
Issuing Sunday dresses
Combed precisely
SPLOSH
Pours something
Viscuous
Malefic
Unfamiliar

While listening up I hear my husband
Mumbling Mumbling
Mumbling at the window
Malediction
Incantation
Under an hour
Her hand to her side pressing
Suffering
Being bewitched
Cesira fading
Daily daily feeble softer

The doctor Phthisis
The wise woman says to take her
So we following her instruction
I and the neighbour
Take her ---

The glass rattling
The rain slipping
I and the neighbour and her aunt
Bunched together
And Cesira
Droops across the cab

Fields and houses
Pass like the pulling out
Of sweetmeat ribbon
From a rascal's mouth
Till
A wheel in a rut
Jerks back my girl on the padding
And hedges into the sky

Coming to the magic tree

Cesira becomes as a wild beast
A tree of age

If Cesira should not become as a wild beast
It is merely Phthisis
This being the wise woman's instruction

Knowing she has to die
We drive home
To wait
She certainly does in time

It is unnatural in a Father
Bewitching a daughter
Whose hair down covers her thighs.

Sketch of a Man on a Platform

Man of absolute physical equilibrium
You stand so straight on your legs
Every plank or clod you plant your feet on
Becomes roots for those limbs

Among the men you accrete to yourself
You are more heavy
And more light
Force being most equitably disposed
Is easiest to lift from the ground
So at the same time
Your movements
Unassailable
Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet
The essence of a Mademoiselle Genée
Winks in the to-and-fro of your cuff-links

Your projectile nose
Has meddled in the more serious business
Of the battle-field
With the same incautious aloofness
Of intense occupation
That it snuffles the trail of the female
And the comfortable
Passing odors of love

Your genius
So much less in your brain

Than in your body
Reinforcing the hitherto negligible

Qualities
Of life
Deals so exclusively with
The vital
That it is equally happy expressing itself
Through the activity of pushing
THINGS
In the opposite direction
To that which they are lethargically willing to go
As in the amative language
Of the eyes

Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any --- or all
Forms of creative idiosyncrasy
While the occasional snap
Of actual production
Stings the face of the public.

Parturition

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pinpoint nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without.
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension

I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait painter
Running upstairs to a woman's apartment
Sings
"All the girls are tid'ly did'ly
All the girls are nice
Whether they wear their hair in curls
Or ---"
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception Brute
Why?
The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.

He is running upstairs
I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes.
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and
negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation

Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?

A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life
LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Tough of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture

Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was-is-ever-shall-be
Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue bottles
--- Epicurean --
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding

The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware

I once heard in a church
--- Man and woman God made them --- Thank God.