(or, an unfortunate series of unrelated things)
or lesser evilism
spectres of want and tragedy
our rape of revered ghosts
our politics of melancholy and cigarette smoke
the distressed voter
the incurable and dying worker lashed to incurable and dying pay scales
the organic arrhythmias of bread and of roses
hands of the empire in the mouth of the century
bloody vice squads of the Western Age
arcs of groused apartment blocks
raving pianos and gnarled cathedral shafts
the burdens of bellicose white men
dimly bourgeois definitions of historical sediments
binary futurist privileges
reproduced, reprogrammable enzymes of war
and dust and grain and unhappy
trees and dictatorship fields of a
proletarian earth
empirical page readings given to blind planets
and you, pale flower,
godless and delicate
like the black ink of empty space,
are a million continents
