Thomas Disch's LJ (RSS Feed)
03-05-2008, 12:09 PM
You! Enormity whom I thought to mock
When I was a nerd of thirty years
And you a grave elder older than the hills
You had already swallowed and shit out.
I shout my name into
Your depths and empty-headed
Echo replies
With a feeble laugh.
She laughs at anybody's joke.
She had a body once--a continent!--
But it has been eroded by forces
Of nature every child is wary of these days--
The wind and rain and somewhere underground
Rivers of magma dark with out death.
For this, O Abyss, is the century we cave.
Our ancestors await us in their graves
Beside the Tiber and the Nile, patient
As their obelisks. Vale vale
And all that jazz.
The sands that were our shorelines
Gone, and gone with them
The poets of unbounded ego--Whitman,
Poe, hollow old Lowell--
Till only I am left,
A no one on the ledge of death.
What do you think of that.
Nothing! You have never thought
A thing about any of us.
Our history has left not so much as
A wrinkle on your wretched skin.
You must help me now, Lifeless Excrescence,
As I take this final step toward
My own immortality.
The western sky is black and starless.
Without a cloud as well.
Death needs no lamp to see us through the night.
Dispose of me, Vastness, as you see fit.
Hawk up some phlegm, then spit.
(Original Post) (http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/179620.html)
When I was a nerd of thirty years
And you a grave elder older than the hills
You had already swallowed and shit out.
I shout my name into
Your depths and empty-headed
Echo replies
With a feeble laugh.
She laughs at anybody's joke.
She had a body once--a continent!--
But it has been eroded by forces
Of nature every child is wary of these days--
The wind and rain and somewhere underground
Rivers of magma dark with out death.
For this, O Abyss, is the century we cave.
Our ancestors await us in their graves
Beside the Tiber and the Nile, patient
As their obelisks. Vale vale
And all that jazz.
The sands that were our shorelines
Gone, and gone with them
The poets of unbounded ego--Whitman,
Poe, hollow old Lowell--
Till only I am left,
A no one on the ledge of death.
What do you think of that.
Nothing! You have never thought
A thing about any of us.
Our history has left not so much as
A wrinkle on your wretched skin.
You must help me now, Lifeless Excrescence,
As I take this final step toward
My own immortality.
The western sky is black and starless.
Without a cloud as well.
Death needs no lamp to see us through the night.
Dispose of me, Vastness, as you see fit.
Hawk up some phlegm, then spit.
(Original Post) (http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/179620.html)