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THE HORROR MEN
With apologies to T. S. Eliot
By Joel Sattler
Mistah Kurtz - he said:
“The horror! The horror!”
I
We are the horror men
We are the oil men.
Scheming together
Codpiece filled with sawdust. Nasty!
Our dead voices, when
We lisp together
Are spite and mean
As wind from our ass
Or rats’ feet over Wall Street
Buyer or seller.
Hate without form, shit without color,
Paralysed in fear, gesture without obscenity;
They who have crossed
With abject eyes, straight to Hell
Remember the U.S. - if at all - not as lost
Terrorized souls, but just
As the horror men
The oil men.
II
Lies I dare not say in dreams
In heaven or even hell
These do not make:
There, the lies are
The only thing that holds us up
There, a hanged man swinging
And falsehoods are
In the ether singing
More untrue and more serious
Than an superstar.
Let me be no schnorrer
In this fantasyland
Let me also don
Such silly costumes
Robin Hood, The Crow, X-Man
In a grid
Behaving as the virus behaves
No clearer-
Not that final freezing
In the dimlit computer screen
III
This is the ruined land
This is burnt land
Here the monoliths
Are set up, here they get
The blessing of the dead Pope
Under the last glint of the last star.
Is this
Hell?
Waking up
In the gutter when we should
Be fricking
Lips that should suck
Babble stoned
IV
The ice is not here yet
There is no ice here
In the valley of the shadow
In the glacial valley
This asses’ jaw of the kingdom of the damned.
In this last of parties
We grope each other
And avert speech
Lying on the beach of the greasy river
Blinded, unless
The eyes see again
As the superstar
Rose in pieces
Of purgatory
The hope solely
Of gutless men.
V
Here we go round the dark shadow
Dark shadow dark shadow
The dark shadow of the blackened soul
At three o’clock in the morning
Between the theory
And the believers
Between the faith
And the fact
Falls the blasphemy
For Thine is the Kikedom
Between the contraception
And the impregnation
Between the fellatio
And the 69
Falls the blasphemy
Life is but a song
Between the lust
And the orgasm
Between the erection
And the tumescence
Between the excretion
And the mess
Falls the blasphemy
For Thine is the Kikedom
For whine is
Lying is
For crime is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but in filth.
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