I have nothing to say / so I let others say it / and that is poetry / as I need it

I have nothing to say / so I let others say it / and that is poetry / as I need it

 

The Dead Flag Blues 

Efrim Menuck / Godspeed You! Black Emperor 

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows 

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn 

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death 

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles 

It went like this: 

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies 
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair 

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze 

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days" 

You grabbed my hand 
And we fell into it
Like a daydream 
Or a fever 

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death 

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

§

"To Elsie" or "The pure products of America / go crazy"

William Carlos Williams

from Spring and all (1923)

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

.
.
.