Canticles for U.G. Krishnamurti
in memory of Vasko Popa (1922-1991)

first written in 1999
SECOND REVISED (and shortened) VERSION (2017)
re-titled

I.
Know, forget, sing
Sing, know, forget
Forget, sing and know
The Empire of Nothing
but consumption: LUXURIA.

More than nine hundred years ago
The First Crusade of cold-eyed killers
with crosses on their chests passed by
The Silver Fortress of the Eagle Realm,
more than a thousand miles
from Palestine.
"Is this the Holy Land ?"
"Where is the Holy Sepulchre ?"
"Give us news !
How far ?"
demanded holy warriors
after they had raped the women
sung their chant
and slaughtered all the Jews
in evil ecstasies of sex and war
and sexwar-rant

Searching among the living
for a crust of not-quite-poisoned bread -
I find only the defining liquor of the dead
dripping from black icicles of cant.

And upon the corpse-strewn beach the Dog
and I who preach in silence to the oily
grains of sand the irredeemability of man.

II.
And now in Palestine
Jewish soldiers masturbate
in front of Muslim girls...
Truth on the wound's edge
'The Sanctity of Sex'
incarnadine
wounds gape and glisten
on the rim of parody,
insanity -
'The Sanctity of Life'
Gurgullim, turbullim.
Frost in the heart
Poems of slush
Needles of language combing the brain.
Behold! a guerrilla of grief
in the Empire of Envy, leaking
through the broken
hinges of his face: no cool prophet
or frigid philosopher frightened
by sweat and by danger
of communication
on the Islands of Anger.
But always, only the lengthless
depth of death persists.
We are suspended in absence,
the puddle of pain we call 'time',
our hearts flapping scabs, our eyes
glazed by world, our brains
confiscated by customs.
All grass is grave-grass. Stars die like flies
like the starving.
Death is not the grave.

Death is the digging.

III.
Connections are always collapsing.
Beneath the roots of words
and flowers and prisons:
drains of nostalgia
when the heart first beats
when we are pushed from the blood-dirge
and steered to tile-white dreams.

After self-digesting Autumn
wedding-rings are pissed in snow.
For no individual - human or worm
is life a gift -
but a mysterious retribution.
We are always on the edge of collapse.
All possible futures are Hell:
only impossible ones include states of grace.
No-one will praise us but adverts,
promotion, publicity.

Yearning blue the colour
of the terrible crease of Man's consciousness,
the pathology of our intelligence.

IV.
It was foretold in the eleventh century
when money was a rare commodity, that
Money will be Emperor.
And money his new clothes:
a scarecrow but no scapegoat
making us bitter,
counting us, counting us,
katër...pesë...counting.
But money always was the only Emperor.

Count me among the dog-crap,
grass-poetry, furry looks
marble webs squirming
millions of clotted meat-hooks
too many people, too many poems,
too many stairs
not enough bears, too many books.

V.
Streetlamps in fog:
such elegance, such courtesy
spilling the blood, tying the vine
burning the trees
always on edge
always on the edge of everything.
As book becomes leaf
and blood becomes brine
and bone becomes root
and love becomes pain
and brain becomes god
may gods become love
that is more than a feeling,
more than the reason for living -
may gods become wine
may gods become rain.

May we become healing.

Refusal and refuse of years,
life is hardly a refuge.
Stupid to weep at the end
when the whole of it calls for tears.

VI.
In the dog's eye, not in ours, there's honesty
and in the cavity where the tooth once was
and in the wood before the page, before the poem
and in the mirror where we -
awakened curses - shrivel.
Like gods, we get smaller,
become goblins,
awakened curses.

Dogs want so little
and we give them even less.

Those of us not turned to zombies by the middle
of childhood
have had our minds mangled like bomb-blasted mannequins
soon after puberty.
The maimed and the hunted, the hunters of happiness.
Man is God's original sin: life-abuse.
We think we're improvement on Nature.
Bones and stones in the caveman's shelter
rumours scraped from enemies
the other half. The gory
brain and bear-skin.
O knife
O word
O welter
give us glory!
Give me, give us glory-life
glory glory-lord
of red anemones.
O Lord of sin.

VII.
Words are the particles of madness
gurgullim, turbullim.
Among the ruins of the desert-world
will crawl the wrapped-up, wrinkled few
who have been able to afford
the capsules of eternal life.
Carrion sunset. A dead dog.
The timeless realm
The kind domain
of utter solitude
The other side of language.

VIII.
One of the Tower-safe Seers observed that beasts
cope better than we can ever do
with the world we have invaded
despoiled, degraded
'The Spiritual' whimpers like dying stars behind us
who are black holes between life and death
never living enough to learn that
wisdom is the opposite of sex, and belief
is the opposite of love; that visions lack perception,
truths lack truthfulness, that we desire control
of everything but desire, and all things bitter
taste only of self. The only way to make
connection with anything is to cut the crap
knowing that we are crap
upon vast deserts of our own banality.
But nobody cares about wisdom.

The Pharaoh's and the leper's
waters lubricate the rutting mouth:
the sum of disembodied voices
in the sponge before the endless
emptiness of eyes mixes grey destruction
in a field of mud and guts quagmired
by bursting cows.
What is reality, and what is talk
about reality ? and do I leave
before or after my sad hut is trodden down ?
Butterfly of truth
The animals slowly starving
stinking in the Kabul and Sarajevo zoos
Black walls of Aleppo,
black cows of anguish -
all of us need all the help that we can get...

Through unnavigable noise
the garbage of my DNA,
gurgullim, turbullim
the sewage-barge - and yet, repeatedly,
I'm like a horse who - before the whip falls -
leaps into himself

into nothing.

IX.
Farmstead of time:
fortified, mindraping manstump
dribbling falsified, serial sagas
through wounding, through pain
Marrying, massacring, moaning
again and again and again

How many barbs
in the worldwire ?
how many deserts are folded
in scrotums whose spermfall
bleaches the ore-plundered
body of earth
beyond my dearthbody ?
Everything viscous
dishwasher-water my blood
my meta-
phors trans/
lating/fer-
rying/posing
to you-other-dying
my Charongrey brain-banal
emptiness,
teeming narcissus-nothing
that refuses to die
before the stuttering
shuddering
yet-to-be self-annulling
werewolf-witness...
O the unutterable, ineffable, almost-unimpeachable
pointlessness of writing poetry!...

X.
Sleep dreams alone
Sleep weeps himself to sleep
her face a lake
We only think we are awake

For oars - a ladder
No consolation for consciousness
but wilderness crying
crying wildness crying beyond rhyme
in wilderness of voice, of womb, of steel.
Sperm, skull, ghoul -
the wrong dead row like slimy spies
having secreted stagnant ponds more than
they ever would reveal
through paper, the texture of time.

XI.
The flower on the axe is flesh
The landscape like a dog tied up
and beaten to death
The fields force-fed and raped
The hills on hunger-strike

Day upon day, like a
coffin-boat hewn in the forest of feeling
I feel ransack of people digging the worldgrave
their science hollowing
hallowing the woundhole
The spirit sputters
goes dark and drops
into the nothingness-mine of the soul.

XII.
In the bitter end,
our wonderful
intelligence (the only source
of cunning unreason and evil)
into our meddlesome,
voyeuristic shallowness

our wonderful
intelligence
overwhelmingly
produces - from deserts
of its own banality -
only suppression of itself:

deserts of its own banality:
suppression of itself:
Terrorist: another word for nothing to be gained.

In the great cellar of the Palace
of Dreams lies the Pale Dreamer
of Dreams dreaming
every dream that has ever
been dreamed:

KNOWLEDGE IS ONLY SEX,
UNDERSTANDING IS THE
OPPOSITE OF...

meaning

(but what's the point of complaining ?)
Suffering's the only god
and everyone's his profit
In many countries cruelty
to dogs is considered meritorious -
and in some dog-meat is considered tastier
if the animal is beaten to death
as it hangs from a noose

XIII.
Keeps the cold wind out
keeps the cold wolf out
the moon
the night
the light
the flies
the noise
but not the echoes
A door
keeps the spirits
and the victims out
keeps hell and heaven
god, the world
and you and you
and you
and them out

keeps me and the terrible
small mirrors in.

XIV.
They are all me - all the beasts in unspeakable
pain from what my species gets no joy
but only grim dissatisfaction from doing.
So I intoxicate myself with the rancid
realisation of despair:
Ujko!
a guilty beast, silently howling.

XV.
In unpseudodemocratic times
men of power went to poets, poetesses,
beasts to gain some insight -
then promoted wars.

Wolf is hell-teacher, heaven-mocker
unheard messenger
Wolf is cinema, wind-prophet, lustral luster,
fugitive and charnel-house and truster
who drags his bones
through radiant darkness
dying stars.

XVI.
Guns and marble
White alphabets on black skin regiments
marble-white of spate
of sperm and bones and milk and bread
No matter whose corpse you lift you expose
those who need the protection of corpses
Truth liquefies beauty
Meat bleeds the unsayable unsaid
The infinite silence of terrible answers
Tearshroud
The dead
unable to imagine the opposite of meaning,
the hungry dead whose lives are fed
by hunger:
hunger after hunger
black milk of money
hungering
for what cannot be said.

XVII.
Over eighty (unaborted)
children were reported eaten
(heads and all ?)
by a Russian cannibal

Is life a hole we dig ourselves out of
or into ?
Unburiably, shit also shits
Let me know if I hit a vein.
In antique days unwanted children
were "exposed" on mountainsides.
Now all must be wanted, and all
are offered eagerly, entire
as tribute to the State

For us the Unspeakable Us
bleaching our Shadow
alone teeming alien
Words are no path
Language no bridge
no tool of wisdom
but weapon and wound: The Fall

We find
and keep on seeking, cheating, speaking, leaking
And the pyramidal shows
are whatever is and nothing less.
Nothing more than the dreadful all of us
in balconies and rows
and boxes of a million mirrored
stageless theatres.
Better to have paid
not to be here
adventurously vomiting in space:
eating our children is the nearest
we can get to grace.

XVIII.
It's not the meaning of life
(which is only absurdity)
that is important, but the meaning
of death
the soft liberation
of unmeaning into which I

turbullim, gurgullim
pabuzagaz, shkatërrim
barkas
Erreztazunak
RRËMBIMTHI
imagining myself to be
truth's sterilized bride
must leap or dance
or elide.
Though earth is in all of us
we don't care to know
we really don't care
(Just let me know when I hit a vein)
We count spoons with computers
count lies
Men's seed
is tears rolling back into
navel-tight eyes
ruptured moons
into rotwork
deathinlife
We need
(though neither giving nor receiving
has much to do with whatever might be meant
by blessedness)

we need to give
what we most need, least desire:
Nonentity, non-empire,
ultimate Wisdom of Nothing.

FIRST REVISED VERSION (2013)

I. Lodhur

Know, forget, sing
Sing, know, forget
Forget, sing and know
The Empire of Nothing
but consumption: ERREZTAZUNAK.

More than nine hundred years ago
The First Crusade of cold-eyed killers
with crosses on their chests passed by
The Silver Fortress of the Eagle Realm,
more than a thousand miles
from Palestine.
"Is this the Holy Land ?"
"Where is the Holy Sepulchre ?"
"Give us news !
How far ?"
demanded holy warriors
after they had raped the women
sung their chant
and slaughtered all the Jews
in evil ecstasies of sex and war

Searching among the living
for a crust of holy bread -
I find only the defining liquor of the dead
dripping from black icicles of cant.

And upon the beach the dog
and I who preach in silence to the oily
grains of sand the irredeemability of man.

II. Pezull

And now in Palestine
Israeli soldiers masturbate
in front of Muslim girls...
Truth on the wound's edge
'The Sanctity of Sex'
Wounds gape and glisten
on the rim of truthfulness
'The Sanctity of Life'

Gurgullim, turbullim

The dead believe that a poet
can't be a poet until he is
deadened by publishing.

The word valiant
has gone missing.

Frost in the heart
Poems of slush
Needles of language combing the brain.

Behold! a guerrilla of grief
in the Empire of Envy, leaking
through the broken
hinges of his face: no cool prophet
or frigid philosopher frightened
by piss and by danger
of communication
on the Islands of Anger.

But always, only the lengthless
depth of death persists.
We are suspended in absence,
the puddle of pain we call 'time',
our hearts flapping scabs, our eyes
glazed by world, our brains
confiscated by customs.

All grass is grave-grass. Stars die like flies
like the starving.
Death is not the grave.
Death is the digging.

III. Mizëri

Connections are always collapsing.
Beneath the roots of words
and flowers and prisons:
drains of nostalgia
when the heart first beats
when we are pushed from the blood-dirge
and steered to tile-white dreams.

After self-digesting Autumn
wedding-rings are pissed in snow.
For no individual - human or worm
is life a gift -
but a mysterious retribution.
We are always on the edge of collapse.
All possible futures are Hell:
only impossible ones include states of grace.

Yearning blue the colour
of the crease of consciousness,
the pathology of intelligence.

IV. Fytazi

It was foretold in the eleventh century
when money was a rare commodity, that
Money will be Emperor.
And money his new clothes:
a scarecrow but no scapegoat
making us bitter,
counting us, counting us,
katër...pesë...counting.

But money always was the only Emperor.

Count me among the dog-crap,
grass-poetry, furry looks
marble webs squirming
too many people, too many poems, too many stairs
not enough bears, too many books.

V. Trishtim

Streetlamps in fog:
such elegance, such courtesy
spilling the blood, tying the vine
burning the trees
always on edge
always on the edge of everything.
As book becomes leaf
and blood becomes brine
and bone becomes root
and love becomes pain
and brain becomes god
may gods become love
that is more than a feeling,
more than the reason for living -
may gods become wine
may gods become rain.

May we become healing.

Refusal and refuse of years,
life is hardly a refuge.
Stupid to weep at the end
when the whole of it calls for tears.

VI. Lakuriqësi

In the dog's eye, not in ours, there's honesty
and in the cavity where the tooth once was
and in the wood before the page, before the poem
and in the mirror where we -
awakened curses - shrivel.
Like gods, we get smaller,
become goblins,
awakened curses.

Dogs want so little
and we give them even less.

Those of us not spiritually dead by the end
of childhood
have been murdered by the end of puberty.
Even before the dewdrops vanish
each upon a thorn -
we start the daily sowing of the seeds of Hell,
each of us a mirrored cell:
the hunted, the hunters of happiness.
Man is God's original sin: life-abuse
We think we're improvement on Nature.

Bones and stones in the caveman's shelter
rumours scraped from enemies
the other half. The gory
brain and bear-skin.
O knife
O word
O welter
give us glory!
Give me, give us glory-life
glory glory-lord
of red anemones.
O Lord of sin.

VII. Fatkeq

Words are the particles of madness
gurgullim, turbullim.
Among the ruins of the desert-world
will crawl the wrapped-up, wrinkled few
who have been able to afford
the capsules of eternal life.

Carrion sunset. A dead dog.
The timeless realm
The kind domain
of utter solitude

The other side of language.

VIII. Barkas

One of the Tower Seers observed that beasts
cope better than we can ever do
with the world we have degraded.

'The Spiritual' whimpers like dying stars behind us
who are black holes between life and death
never living enough to learn that
wisdom is the opposite of sex, and belief
is the opposite of love; that visions lack perception,
truths lack truthfulness, that we desire control
of everything but desire, and all things bitter
taste only of self. The only way to make
connection with anything is to cut the crap
knowing that we are crap
upon vast deserts of our own banality.

The Pharaoh's and the leper's
waters lubricate the rutting mouth:
the sum of disembodied voices
in the sponge before the endless
emptiness of eyes mixes grey destruction
in a field of mud and guts quagmired
by bursting cows.
What is reality, and what is talk
about reality ? and do I leave
before or after my sad hut is trodden down ?

Butterfly of truth
The animals slowly starving
stinking in the Kabul and Sarajevo zoos
Black walls of Chech'nya,
black cows of anguish -
all of us need all the help that we can get...

Through unnavigable noise
the garbage of my DNA,
gurgullim, turbullim
the sewage-barge - and yet, repeatedly,
I'm like a horse who - before the whip falls -
leaps into himself

into nothing.

IX. Rrëmbimthi

Farmstead of time:
fortified, mindraping manstump
dribbling falsified, serial sagas
through wounding, through pain
Marrying, massacring, moaning
again and again and again

How many barbs
in the worldwire ?
how many deserts are folded
in scrotums whose spermfall
bleaches the ore-plundered
body of earth
beyond my dearthbody ?
Everything viscous
dishwasher-water my blood
my meta-
phors trans/
lating/fer-
rying/posing
to you-other-dying
my Charongrey brain-banal
emptiness,
teeming narcissus-nothing
that refuses to die
before the stuttering
shuddering
yet-to-be self-annulling
werewolf-witness...

O the unutterable, almost-unimpeachable
pointlessness of writing poetry!...

X. Teposhtë

Sleep dreams alone
Sleep weeps himself to sleep
his face a lake
We only think we are awake

For oars - a ladder
No consolation for consciousness
but wilderness crying
crying wildness crying beyond rhyme
in wilderness of voice, of womb, of steel.
Sperm, boy, man, skull, ghoul -
the wrong dead row like slimy spies
having secreted stagnant ponds more than
they ever would reveal
through paper, the texture of time.

XI. Njollë

The flower on the axe is flesh
The landscape like a dog tied up
and beaten to death
The fields force-fed and raped
The hills on hunger-strike

Day upon day, like a
coffin-boat hewn in the forest of feeling
I feel ransack of people digging the worldgrave
their science hollowing
hallowing the woundhole

The spirit sputters
goes dark and drops - BYK! -
into the nothingness-mine of the soul.

XII. Fillor

In the bitter end,
our wonderful
intelligence (the only source
of cunning unreason and evil)
into our meddlesome,
voyeuristic shallowness

our wonderful
intelligence
overwhelmingly
produces - from deserts
of its own banality -
only suppression of itself:

deserts of its own banality:
suppression of itself:
deserts
desert
BORN IN A FOREST, DIED IN A...

Terrorist: another word for nothing to be gained.

In the great cellar of the Palace
of Dreams lies the Pale Dreamer
of Dreams dreaming
every dream that has ever
been dreamed:

KNOWLEDGE IS SEX,
UNDERSTANDING IS THE
OPPOSITE OF...

meaning

(but what's the point of complaining ?)

Suffering's the only god
and everyone's his profit

In many countries cruelty
to dogs is considered meritorious -
and in some dog-meat is considered tastier
if the animal is beaten to death
as it hangs from a noose

XIII. Paraqítje

Keeps the wind out
keeps the wolf out
the moon
the night
the light
the flies
the noise
but not the echoes
out

A door
keeps the spirits
and the victims out
keeps hell and heaven
god, the world
and you and you
and them out

keeps me and the terrible
small mirrors in.

 XIV. Shpjegúeshëm

They are all me - all the beasts in unspeakable
pain from what my species gets no joy
but only grim dissatisfaction from doing.
So I intoxicate myself with the rancid
realisation of despair:
Ujko!
a guilty beast, silently howling.

XV. Trembur

In 'undemocratic' times
men of power went to poets, poetesses,
beasts to gain some insight -
then promoted wars.

Wolf is hell-teacher, heaven-mocker
unheard messenger
Wolf is cinema, wind-prophet, lustral luster,
fugitive and charnel-house and truster
who drags his bones
through radiant darkness
dying stars.

XVI. Bulmet

Guns and marble
White alphabets on black skin regiments
marble-white of spate
of sperm and bones and milk and bread
No matter whose corpse you lift you expose
those who need the protection of corpses
Truth liquefies beauty
Meat bleeds the unsayable unsaid

The infinite silence of terrible answers

Tearshroud
The dead
unable to imagine the opposite of meaning,
the hungry dead whose lives are fed
by hunger:
hunger after hunger
black milk of money
hungering
for what cannot be said.

XVII. Pabuzagaz, Parafundit

Over eighty (unaborted)
children were reported
recently to have been eaten
(heads and all ?)
by a Russian cannibal

Is life a hole we dig ourselves out of
or into ?
Unburiably, shit also shits

Let me know if I hit a vein.

In antique days unwanted children
were "exposed" on mountainsides.
Now all must be wanted, and all
are offered eagerly, entire
as tribute to the State

For us the Unspeakable Us
bleaching our Shadow
alone teeming alien
Words are no path
Language no bridge
no tool of wisdom
but weapon and wound: The Fall

We find
and keep on seeking, speaking, leaking
And the shows
are whatever is and nothing less.
Nothing more than all of us
in balconies and rows
and boxes of a million mirrored
stageless theatres.

Better to have paid
not to be here
vc-vomiting in space:
eating our children is the nearest
we can get to grace.

XVIII. Shkatërrim

It's not the meaning of life
(which is only
absurdity) that is
important, but the meaning
of death
the soft liberation
of unmeaning
into which I
truth's uncertain bride
turbullim, gurgullim
Vrka-vc
must leap or dance
or elide.

Though earth is in all of us
we don't care to know
we really don't care

(Just let me know when I hit a vein)

We count spoons with computers
count lies
Men's seed
is tears rolling back into
navel-tight eyes
ruptured moons
into rotwork

We need
(though neither giving nor receiving
has much to do with whatever might be meant
by blessedness)

We need to give
vûkojebinje
what we most need.

download this poem as a printable zipped doc. file

SINE DIE

A Gloss on the Ninth Elegy of Rainer-Maria Rilke

by Anthony Weir

My invisible, only true friend, Father Death,
unknowable, ever-present, everywhere
like a vast four-dimensional carpet,
asks me silently why I have to be human,
why I, shunning destiny, laden down
with my great gift of sorrow, have to be ?
Not because there is a possibility
of the "happiness" that is only
respite from misery, hope;
not that I feel a duty to life the dictatorship, cosmic
catastrophe.

Here in my chamber of misunderstanding,
ineptly wrestling the language of
unutterability, I feel only too-muchness of being
and being one of millions too many.
I'm always wanting to leave both the state
and the chamber - and I'm rooted by both.

Not that we make ourselves happy by torturing
wiping out, exploiting, rounding up animals -
no, increasingly we - the endangering species -
herd and exploit each other, breed
young to disable in nursery-schools, manipulate all signs
of spontaneous joy in each other
for commoditisation..
No, we fear happiness,
because it would show us our blasphemy,
our soulless destructiveness.

Who can possibly want us,
who confront everything with our words and our swords
and, far worse, the product of both: hypocrisy -
every one of us the enemy of what came before us,
all of us mirror-struck, striking
down everything sane and appropriate,
driving out life and replacing it with the screaming and wheedling
urgency of our mad, testosteronal ideas
driving ourselves to achievement ?

There is no-one
to praise us but adverts - Promotion, Publicity;
the Great Puppet God, was enthralled when alive.
The Angels are all bred for bacon and embryos, organs and sperm.
Praise the world to an Angel, and he squeals in the terrible pain
that's producible only by demons of language.
I feel too much. I see that in the world
we have desecrated, joy
is only the briefest suppression of pain.
Science is merely tearing wings off flies
to grow supremely grotesque on Buchenwald pigs.

Even my anguish is mere manufacture.

Joy can only be given.
What do we do that is innocent?
With the blind and backward maze of the mind
we turn everything wonderful terribly
into reflections of our terrible selves.
You my invisible friend, my desirable
Earth Spirit, Anti-angel,
you, beyond right or love or truth or happiness
were always right, always Perfect in your holiest
presence and insight.

And the Dog, with his divine understanding
silently, boundingly tells me each day that there is nothing
to understand for there is no - never was - understanding
- and no lie is big enough, smart enough to justify us.

In my protest
I almost live in the constant awareness
of pain beyond me which I can neither ignore nor transmute
by blinding or art.
So everything shrivels, and only the manifold bleakness
and shame of humanity
pours out of, dries up in my heart.

translations of Rilke >>

Metamorphotos by Anthony Weir