Stephen Morrissey
Canto
One
The empires of the past have fallen, collapsed
into dust, great behemoths of fools and
folly,
banks of black clouds on the horizon,
places of darkness
and abandon, waves crashing on the
stormy ocean shores;
people have gone soft, lazy, and vain,
their vision is narrowed,
concentrating on ephemeral material
stuff, jibber jabber,
Yankee Doodle Dandy, Citizen Kane, monopolies,
day traders, and Las Vegas gambling, a
landscape of sky scrapers
for worshipers at the Church of Mammon,
that's the real religion;
opiods and meth labs, elder abuse,
anything if there's a buck in it;
a place where successful business men are
sociopaths,
including Donald Trump, and factor in
narcissism,
how great Trump says he is, but we hear
this from Americans
everyday; as a student told me, "Of
course I can be
anything I want, my teachers told me
so";
Gatsby: "‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried
incredulously.
‘Why of course you can!’"; Americans
held hostage
by their own myth, the American Dream,
rich careless people
worshiping Mammon; Lou Reed: "Give me your hungry,
your tired your poor, I'll piss on 'em that's what
the Statue of Bigotry says"; the "peanut crunching crowd",
angry and betrayed, outside a cinema in The Day of the Locust,
the American Dream is not for them; it's
not
for the fly-over states, "Who'd want to live down there
in the middle of nowhere", asked Jason Aldean,
down there's where the "basket
of deplorables" live;
black clouds of locust on the horizon, twilight
and the silenced
morning chorus. And remember George W.
Bush?
He's a war criminal I was told at a
Christmas party
by the adult children of rich white
people living in Harlem,
professors and psycho-analysts, you
know, exposed brick walls
lined with books, abstract paintings, the
whole place contemporary,
do-gooders busy grabbing up (I mean
"gentrifying"...) working class
neighbourhoods, oblivious to the long-term
residents
who have to move or be homeless / the
dollar is mightier
than anything ... anyhow, they said W., including
his cohort,
Rumsfeld and Cheney, are war criminals, deserving
prosecution and time served in a federal
prison;
in eight years half a million dead by
these terrifying caricatures
of human beings; their god is money,
they'd water board you
in heaven if it meant a profit. And
remember Mr. Obama in 2008:
elevated to sainthood and awarded a
Nobel Peace Prize,
what was that all about? "You go into these small towns, the jobs
have been gone now for 25
years, each successive administration
has said these communities
are gonna regenerate and they have not,
they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward
people
who aren't like them ..." This is how he saw hard-working Americans,
patriotic to a fault, generous and hopeful of the future,
betrayed by their leaders who supported the global economy
over their own people. What about small towns in Libya?
How did Libyans feel when invaded by Obama and Hillary's orders?
Bombed to hell for oil, Ghadafi beaten and shot, a failed state
of war lords, an armed camp, and some guy driving a white
Toyota pick-up truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on the back.
Canto
Two
America, where the weekends are reserved
for mass killings,
it's just one symptom of decline and
collapse;
the imagination is barren, soul sickness infecting the world;
when society is corrupt, bring out the clowns: "Don't you love farce?
My fault, I fear, I thought that you'd want what I want Sorry, my dear!";
be an entertainer or an actor, "Just around the corner,
There's a rainbow in the sky. So let's have another cup of coffee,
And let's have another piece o' pie!" There's a future in dancing
and singing, it's the old desperation rag; where are the world's
great leaders? it's all get rich quick, Mammon is god;
"Money for nothing and the sex is free".
When did the Great Decline begin?
The
Viet Nam War? Reagan? 9/11?
Or
when beliefs and values
were
abandoned by well-meaning
people,
convinced that
what
they believed was wrong
and
always had been wrong,
that
they must accommodate
the
future order of things, and only later
did
some of these same people realize
the
consequence of surrendering
their
traditions and values,
discarding
what had once been
the
basis of their lives, what had been
true
and good about life;
they
hadn't yet experienced
the
Mammon god, avarice and greed,
the
loss of meaning and belief
in
something greater than themselves;
they
ended soul dead, living
an
inauthentic life, and treading
water
in oblivion.
Canto
Three
America,
be careful,
if
your soul is sick
you
may as well
have
no soul,
you
may not recover,
you
may end up soul dead;
the
age called for great leaders,
for
men and women of depth
and
intelligence, soul
and
compassion,
and
who came forward?
Politicians
out for power
and
a lucrative book deal
leading
to the lecture circuit.
Canto
Four
The old ways are finished,
there is no return to traditions
and values, the familiarity
of friends dropping in on each other,
hospitality and family;
now it's a roof collapsing
on people sitting in the kitchen,
the radio in the background
some right wing phone-in show;
termites in the support beams,
dry rot in the timbers and the hard wood
floor sagging by the dining room window;
the foundation is built on sand,
it cannot hold up these walls
these stone walls that have heard
talk of wars, revolutions, governments elected
and defeated, anger and a fist banging
on the kitchen table; but others found
wealth
in America and transformed wealth into
greed,
paradise into hell: think of Bezos and
Musk,
Zukerberg and Uber's Kalanick,
Page and Brin; "Bezos sees
corporations
like his own as being way more efficient
at structuring and organizing society
as compared to governments." It's
an
unholy alliance, business and politics.
What do politicians want? Power
and control of government;
every election is a coup d'état,
the
whole stinking edifice
of
deceit and lies, betrayal
and
avarice; they're the walking dead
looking
in the window at you, surveilling
emails,
recording phone calls, CCTV,
government
watching you; there's nothing
like
a war to keep the public motivated,
not
just world wars lasting five years
but
several simultaneous wars
lasting
decades, it's perpetual war,
fireworks
and the red white and blue.
There is no repentance or forgiveness
on America's green and lonely shores,
the scales of greed have slipped too far;
one man on HGTV has a 20K square foot
house,
an infinity pool in the back yard
overlooking
the Pacific Ocean, and in the garage
his collection of antique automobiles
built in an age when few would have
understood this wealth, this greed.
Canto
Five
The spiritual border is porous
but the physical border can't be
breached,
on the American side, sharp shooters
lying
on the custom building's roof
checking out cars for tourist-terrorists;
America is under quarantine, they're
sick with the American disease,
a virus in the blood, headaches,
addiction, stage four insanity.
Canadians rejected union
with the United States in 1867
and we'd reject it again today,
saying back then Americans are too
violent,
they aren't religious, and all they care
about
is making money; but not to worry,
we still eat your chocolate bars,
watch your violent and sentimental
television shows, are shocked
at your news on NBC ABC CBS
PBS CNN and FOX;
the
American Dream
destroyed by what the American Dream
has become; so giddy on up El Paso way,
bodies bouncing off the aisles of
shampoo,
TVs, and children's clothes in Walmart;
oh jeezus, fuck Walmart, bodies lying
where they fell; did the shooter
buy his ammo at Walmart? And, thus,
Walmart enters history as a crime scene,
a place of commerce and death.
Canto
Six
The world has been Americanized, movies,
music,
food and fashion! Subway and McDonald's
in a remote town somewhere in northern
China,
a province in the future United States
of the World,
a division of One World, One Corporation,
Inc.,
serving fat Chinese boys on skateboards;
everything old must be destroyed /
that's
where we're headed / that's the message,
intelligence is out of style, social
media
has people screaming at each other;
buy your way into USC / lies taught
as historical fact, the anti-fascists are fascists,
statues pulled down by angry mobs,
I am more afraid of the mobs
than of the statues; it's a Cultural Revolution,
re. China 1966 to 1976—The American
Little
Red Book of the Dead, filled with epigrams
and angry poems of malice and hate—
and see where that left the Chinese, the
whole society
caught in violent upheaval; you can't
make up
what politicians will do to stay in
office: start a war?
regime change? invade a neighbour? deny
millions
of people the vote? gerrymander electoral
districts?
fix an election? divide up the spoils, who
gets what now
and who gets what next time? Keep people
in perpetual
debt, poverty, fighting in perpetual
wars;
the higher the office the greater the
corruption.
Beelzebub old buddy, let us kiss your
hairy ass:
Trump ripped the scab off of American
life
exposing more than he intended, the
whole edifice
is corrupt; Ronald Reagan at the service
of Mammon,
closing mental hospitals to cut costs, cut
taxes
for the rich, now every city has the
homeless,
hoards of them, a new social class for the
21st Century:
call them American Dhalits.
Canto Seven
Ezra Pound was right about usury, "Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura"; lending money at exorbitant interest rates
is evil, and who benefits? Banks and credit card companies benefit,
both are financial pedophiles grooming the public with advertising,
point awards, vacation packages to exotic places, but only
if you accrue debt on credit, only if you live beyond your means;
half the population is in debt, seduced by VISA, Master Card,
American Express, pay-day lenders, even social media have plans
for their own currency, for a piece of this lucrative deal.
The wealthy, people like Jeffrey Epstein and friends,
slobber down roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,
gravy running down the corners of their mouths,
bottles of wine consumed, while families need
three salaries to survive, one salary no longer enough:
whoever indebts another is evil; credit at 22% and more
is not a service or convenience, it is usury for banks' profit;
dressed in Friday casual wear, blue jeans and a T-shirt,
bankers are the same thugs as loan sharks who break your legs
if you don't pay their compounded interest; their aim is to replace
currency with credit cards and to profit twice from every
financial transaction: 2% or more paid by the stores
and 22% or more paid by consumers on unpaid debt.
This is the evil of our age: bank pimps, money launderers,
and pyramid schemers, all of them whoring for money;
over half the country is in debt and believe they'll always
be in debt; the banks' formula for success: the interest
they are owed must always be increasing and greater
than the amount borrowed; and get the suckers to pay up,
and better yet, get them to borrow from one credit card
to pay a second credit card; pay interest on the interest;
corporate profit not one billion but 10 billion
per quarter. The banks are angry when you can't pay,
they meet you in the manager's office
for the ritual of cutting up your credit cards,
the disapproving branch manager and the failed
financial adviser are present with their twisted
moral turpitude, they are angry because they've lost
collecting the usurious interest that you once paid;
the old morality, save for the future, self-denial,
live within your means, now impossible;
only deadbeats pay their monthly balance;
average people driving to work in second hand cars,
their children at state run schools, parents
who don't want their children deprived of the stuff
advertised on TV; people bankrupt and made homeless;
not even a poor house or debtors prison for refuge,
now it's a back lane, a bus shelter, a park bench,
the back seat of a car, a tent in a city park;
and always more consumer goods, more stuff to buy,
all of it made on the cheap in foreign countries,
seducing average people into perpetual debt
and keeping them there.
Canto Eight
What
people want
is
freedom, not hands
bound
behind their backs,
eyes
blindfolded, mouths taped
shut,
the police at the front door;
people
want freedom of speech,
freedom
from religion or to be religious,
freedom
to think one's own thoughts,
freedom
of expression,
freedom
to own property /
or
to get up and move far away,
to
live in peace /
freedom
to make money
or
/ best of all /
freedom
to be left alone.
Canto
Nine
I've been watching American news too
long,
since the war in Viet Nam, Watergate, and
Nixon's
departure on a helicopter from the White
House lawn;
it begins to repeat, mass shootings, perpetual
war,
fighting in the streets / and now we're driving
home,
listening to The Fugs singing "Kill, kill, kill for peace ";
education and the news media keep people
pacified
and contained, ignorant of their
ignorance:
ask someone "what happened 100
years ago?"
or just yesterday? No idea. Who cares?
What does it matter? If The Donald didn't
exist
he'd have to be invented; it's the end
of satire
when it's all satire; Paul Robeson: "The
words
of old Abe Lincoln, of Jefferson and Paine,
of Washington and Douglas, and the task
that still remains." Instead, we hear a creaking
sound, the sound of collapse; voices in
the night,
from the next room, from just outside
your window, first the roof collapses
and then the basement fills with water;
where is John Brown? where are the
heroes?
where is the heart and soul? not the God
damned
phony heart and soul on TV or the
latest degenerate
popular movie with its corrupt moral
values,
not some movie actor telling us what we
should believe;
interviewed
or giving speeches at the Golden Globe Awards,
every
Hollywood actor is an authority on politics and morality;
they're
actors for God's sake, trained to convince others
that
they know what they're talking about; in appearance
many actors have "very little back or top to their head.
It is almost all face, like a mask" (Nathaniel West);
the
camera loves their big smiling faces,
and
on Sunday mornings they're on the golf course
with
their politician friends, or screwing
whoever
they can get hold of.
What about our own voice, telling the
great
empty cosmos that we are here? Speak up
and celebrate life, always the cosmic "yes"
despite the politicians and actors,
the blue sky overhead and the sun warm
on one's face;
it's the Great Decline, the end of
history,
the end of time, the river polluted,
the old abandoned; a country gone
soft
in the service of its own
enslavement.
Canto Ten
John
Brown,
an
old man
with
integrity
and
a belief
in
freedom
and
truth,
as
opposed to
the
new American vision,
diminished,
crude, and violent;
the
Yew tree in the graveyard,
that's
where this greed and excess leads;
too
much of everything followed by
not
enough of anything
and
expected to last into perpetuity;
ignorance
placed above intelligence;
John
Brown's "last written message" before execution,
a
month after the Harpers Ferry defeat,
"I,
John Brown, am now quite certain
that
the crimes of this guilty land will
never
be purged away but with blood.
I
had as I now think vainly flattered
myself
that without very much bloodshed
it
might be done."
A country of entertainers, children
hamming it up for the camera,
pulling faces and contorted limbs, and
middle-aged parents
indulging them in a sing-song voice.
A divided country that believes
fame is more important than moral
depth; they were sold an illusion;
films and TV shows cranked out to
convert people
to the Corporate Dream; the Slave
State is back, chains and a whip
are in style: destroy the old,
embrace what is popular, buy more stuff,
if it's new it's gotta be better:
Hollywood's pimps
gonna lead you to the promised land ...
Walt
Whitman: "I would sing how an old man, tall,
with white hair, mounted the
scaffold in Virginia,
I watch'd you old man cool and
indifferent,
but
trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds you mounted".
Canto Eleven
Forget nothing: we've become a society
of amnesiacs;
was it this morning, last week, last
month, a century ago,
what was it we were talking about? It's
disappeared
behind a black curtain of forgetfulness.
We are displaced persons lost in a
cloud, or on a dark plain;
Q: What do you remember? A. Not much,
maybe nothing.
It's easier to forget than to remember,
and as for the news media,
articles to scroll through on a tablet
before they're deleted
or revised, it's all forgotten as its
read to be replaced in seconds
by new lies, new biases, new
interpretations, the publics'
attention span is down to seconds; because
you have already
been drugged or lobotomized, you accept
what is reported
as normal: perpetual war, perpetual
debt, a million homeless people
living on the streets, someone lying on
a hot air vent or on a piece
of cardboard across the sidewalk on a
downtown street,
in winter, in 0º F; all the bullshit
poetry, novels, movies streaming
into your home, meaningless and vapid,
at the service of this evil,
a part of the new world culture, forget
high culture / no one's
even heard of it, who remembers what
that was all about?
"Believe nothing", that's my
motto. What's left in the
collective forgetfulness, what was
refuted, rewritten,
it's all lies, including Facebook memes,
network news,
newspapers, people are intolerant of anyone
disagreeing
with them: "How can you say
that?" "You are a POS!"
"Go fuck yourself you
fascist!" "When they go low,
we go even lower" is how the world
works.
A mob of walking dead, old people sharing
a room
with someone's corpse; it's a holocaust at
the end
of a collapsing civilization; thank God we'll
all be dead
by morning, it's the only escape; nobody
gets out of here
alive; and the future is a place of corporations,
if you think politicians were bad just
wait—CEOs,
CFOs—their god is Mammon and they're true
believers,
converts at birth, and the public are
lining up to pray with them.
Canto Twelve
Spirit is destroyed, people shuffling
through the streets staring at iPhones;
two evils: perpetual war and perpetual debt;
constant propaganda to keep people
ignorant, the power of television and movies,
popular entertainment seducing people
to buy what they don't need, to believe
what few believed in the past, to accept values
that their parents, grandparents,
even their ancestors just off the boat
would find horrifying; the edifice of state
is collapsing, a circus tent with elephants
standing upright on their hind legs;
here come the clowns, make-up always
a metaphor for death, white face and a red
downturned mouth, a single tear painted
under the left eye, and the tent collapsing
trapping everyone inside—it's Grand Guignol,
Punch and Judy, the testimony of generals,
Judas Iscariot, and newly hired concentration
camp workers, cameras on everyone, the guy
at the next urinal is a state spy, workers
for the government's Public Scrutiny Department
observe with interest what's happening
at Hell Incorporated; a danse macabre,
the collapsing tent, manipulation of people
for the enrichment of the few, politicians fellating
each other in public toilets; Professor so and so
says these are brilliant poems you've written,
deconstructions of telepathically received
gibberish; history rewritten by government hacks;
the informer is your father hiding behind a curtain
in your living room, he's eager to turn you in;
CCTV cameras on every block recording
who does what, who goes where, algorithms
to detect dissent and control behaviour;
everything you say will be used against you;
I hear the anthem of the New American Republic,
sung by a hundred thousand upright members of society,
sedated and compliant; meanwhile, whatever
defined our society in the past has been downgraded
from mediocre to obsolete; someone is planning
a future where everyone looks the same, blonde hair
mannequins with blank stares and always smiling
with the whitest teeth possible; they think
this is just great, folks, it's never been better!
Canto Thirteen
To articulate the collapse of America:
darkness in the dead of night,
a dying man's final breath,
a tent collapsing, an envelope of darkness.
Lying on a deserted beach, a dead fish with a belly full
of maggots; politicians are smooth talkers
but as for truth, they have none;
a stinking corpse dumped on the side
of the road. Divide people into two groups:
one made up of workers, average people;
the other are the politicians, out for power,
spending other people's money, taxed at source,
legislating for perpetual debt, no altruism
or benevolence but for self-gain.
It was no different in the past, in the old days
when a circus tent was set up in a farmer's field,
near the cattle pens at the railroad station,
with the sun setting on the other side of the field,
and entering this tent the locals were sold
fake remedies for arthritis, bad nerves,
or impotence by hucksters and liars;
and during elections, politicians gave speeches
at the rear of passenger trains crossing the country
and crowds eager to hear these speeches;
even the towns were divided in two,
on one side of the tracks those with money
and on the other side is where the poor lived;
but still the yokels cheered hearing of reform and a society
in which promises would be fulfilled for the betterment
of the people, but it rarely happened that way:
the circus tent collapsed during the second
performance of the evening, clowns and animal trainers
spitting up bile and blood, then the apocalyptic fire,
everything up in flames; the next morning
as the sun appeared on the horizon,
a pile of smoking ashes
and embers floating into the sky;
Oh,
ye poets, your obsolescence
is
guaranteed, so speak the truth
or
be forever excluded from public
discourse
and solitary union with eternity.
Stephen
Morrissey
August 2019 - January 2020
Note: The photograph of John Brown's grave,
located at his homestead just outside of
Lake
Placid, New York, was taken by Stephen
Morrissey
in the mid-1990s.
