do you follow?

– ‘In literary matters, Ezra Pound advised against accepting the opinion of those “who haven’t themselves produced notable work,” and it is advice I have been privileged to follow’ – Seamus Heaney in his 1995 acceptance speech for the Nobel prize
– Ezra Pound’s open support of Mussolini’s fascism mirrors Heidegger’s love-affair with Nazism
– In spite of damning evidence of extra-judicial killings and wide scale state-sponsored massacres, progressives never tire of insisting that the monopoly of violence should rest with the state
– The state is notable
– And it advises
– Are you privileged?
– Do you follow?

—

We stand to wreck this distance / by the pole of
         this wretched star / longing to see peace
                              lodged in small places
         this heart weary of distance, this wretched
                       star / longing to see peace
---
a respectful peer dons the
green/ it is 

but the red of musk this 
muttering of

handled existentia - ask the
hurried tree

—

there is this need to link the solemn
with the grotesque, the

iron chain with the rot in the sewer,
mistaken smiles with

the haunting similes that prefigure
the vapors that crutch

the lie that mauls the verb that
catapults this blood