"Critique of Pure Reason"
© 2007 Sean Farragher
Description: Structure of the poem will answer in contemporary images four questions that Kant suggested in his revolutionary work: Part I -- What can I know?; Part II -- Who Are We? What is a Human Being?; Part III -- What can be done?; Part IV -- What can I hope for?; Part V -- Aesthetics/Beauty
Section 1 What Can I Know?
Section 2 Who Are We? What is a Human Being?
Section 3 What is to be done?
Section 4 What Can I hope for?
Section 5 Aesthetics/Beauty
"Critique of Pure Reason"
What Can I know?
Every day the world climbs longer and shorter at the same time.
It passes from eclipse to sun fall that never rises out of its blue
ink marked on mountain face when blighted arms write tattoos
with electrical pens that are incomplete when cuts leave their
yeast infected mold after hurricane rises bloom as pain
artful artifice to colorful links of primordial greed.
Inside that leper colony dying becomes more an agricultural
waste removal not considered malignant but with TS Eliot
Epigram rising on the white capped mountains with obtuse
Montana imagery and that intellectual snobbery that gets lost
after the first rounds are shot and madness blessed wise
when Ezra Pound cuts and scrapes the lost nouns and patient
"What is the Wasteland" scream after Assyrian mythology
lingers near the pyramids with the first archeologist who
survived not only the Fall of Man as New Testament gossip
but those wounds driven in mind's chalk board dance
vowels forever over the lickety-split street as walls like
eggshells tumble down forever in the holes dug by hand
to isolate the hungry outside the city walls while they
wait in pure lines for virtue never born and sleep
was a luxury beyond the offertory or love collected
and spent easily in back rooms and brothel hotels.
2.
What are ends and beginnings when
so many depend on predicted
natural disorder to rise above
Genesis to display that accordance
we correct in time logs for variance
and other
probability functions
dropped inside broken coke bottles
from the ledge of the White Cliffs of Dover
stained by honorary blood sacrificed
by false virgin masks and totem pole to
dance in the masque presented
for Kings and Queens on Fifth
Street and Avenue C in New York
as pee mist rises from
hallways
of ancient immigrant buildings
without racial claims or doubts.
The world like its horny literature rattles the back doors easily.
No demonstration project can be rated below R and XXX
pleases too many millions of clickers from every way of life.
We are beaten hard by collective arms and fingers from poets
wrestling with season and their insecure fire base left behind
with assorted guns, ammo and devices for civilian control.
The Critique of Pure Reason" Part Two
Who are we? What is a human being?
Sheela-Na-Gig
(June 1966) First Wife
Sheila is woman's name.
Gig is her cup of lips stretched
with care into open bowl for drink.
She laughs and lets her Molly voice
revise childhood like rare cookie
fingers and her Acts of Montessori.
We open warm pink strawberries.
She comes before the dam breaks
and moist fingers slip O'Keefe flowers.
2.
Consider Kant in his delirium. He measured
intuition with an architect's rule and the sky
falls out of the space where chalk lines are rough.
"The world is out of plumb." he shouts;
we gather ripe, red fruit into a barrel
to crush it with temptation and bliss.
Later, we crawl into the streets below
Soho and scream murder with delight.
It is all disconnected when the IED blows
that man and his hands into mock soup.
Nothing we dream transforms swart into white
as earth shattering vermillion clouds undress
the sweet pink loins and we are at grace.
Do not pray dear Bishop we do not believe
as we fuck in the aisle of the cathedral
or on the altar as good Christian penitents.
So we plead and will falls into dirty hands
and claps on the sky not only disease,
but the window of a storm raised over
the thighs of an undisturbed virgin forest.
You cannot imagine perfect green except
in Ireland when you cross to Shannon from
the west and land in the gig of Oz. I can
imagine the ideal gig or cunny spread
with the soft white cream and pink foam.
Every clitoris will celebrate blasphemy.
Wake up Sheela-Na-Gig*, dear Ireland.
Fully formed she blends on the bed to unveil
her vulva for constant recapitulation and infants
struck from her eventually by two men in
years since New York City West Side August.
3.
We look back forty years to the hotel room
and the sweet woman who tried to pick
young lovers up for a threesome and
said it would be free of any obstacle.
Years later, my wife and I imagined
together how wonderful that might
have been for first prayers at paradise.
Imagine the St Regis Hotel and Nam
opening up its napalm soup and medics
gathering on the hills as tectonic faults.
Lunch at the Palm Court ended too soon.
My wife dreamed of marrying Dylan
Thomas, and unknown to her, she did.
"A Critique of Pure Reason" Part III
"Just think of the tragedy
of teaching children not to doubt."
-- Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938)
If we pass too slowly round corners
we do not experience that force
that drives us to the edge of things.
We cower in curves afraid
of unnecessary culture and
boxes of regular tribulation
inked without architecture,
whim or the acid of law.
We move from true north
to another declination.
Light discovers the equator
and unknown mountains
one day and a generous
delusion the next after dark.
That Great Mass that falls
lifts nothing but skeleton.
Every invisible bruise
kicked into muscles
and pain without guilt
dries as indelible memory
to glue one version
of the history of being.
Ontology often fails to
account for the reason
for individual seeds and
too little sunlight and
rain failed germination.
Memory does not explain variation.
Chance will not restrain
fate with random broken masks.
We charge the barricade without
fear and die within the timbers.
"Les Paves" fall on our wings
while the righteous set too harsh
a plan to unsettle the waves.
Rivers and oceans break laws
and too easy physics marches
to the hanging gardens without proof
of life, incipient faith as intuition.
One step up and suspicion bangs
us on the chin and totems stagger
without questions to the fall of
mankind with dirty socks in
our mouth and a bloody face.
After our faked, universal death
can Risk know what is truly lost?
Can we teach morality to sandbars
and the carbon based folly of life?
“Critique of Pure Reason” Part IV
What can I hope for?
1.
When I was a child I despised all rituals
that limited pale flowers in failed gardens.
I counted my hands and traced my fingers.
When the sun rose and fell but I stretched
my neck to look for another ride home
under the Edgewater cliff beneath Palisades
Park where the roller coaster swam in salt water.
In that darkness nothing lived but the desire
to count every word and make lists of life
where nothing breathed not even children.
If I was lost, and I was, I never told my mother.
Her maps would not have helped and my
father’s answers left bruises on my feet.
I could not walk away. I was left in the fall
of every moral code, and I knew the truth
when I was barely ten on a ride where I could
not witness or could not speak of life at all.
Blood simple leaked from the waste spilled
with pop corn and peanuts on the side where
French fries and greasy hotdogs ruled.
Pleasure was not forbidden. Death was open.
I watched roses die and I counted the brown
petals of a white zinnia feather the ground
with that hint of ammonia that gathered clean
hands to strangle and cut free love and trees
where leaves could turn yellow and red before
the seasons burned the skin with poisonous
gas or the effluent from septic sores and wounds
where soldiers standing up to flee, fall down
into the broken ground and never grow again.
2.
There was a long pause at the end of the world.
We carried it over the rim and danced with
very last words and sight stripped from fables.
We promised the world truth and justice.
Our worms would never grow to desecrate
the unbounded mathematics where pain
and pleasure roll between thighs and brain.
Nothing carries further into myths but echoes.
Loose guitar strings stretch from one edge to the other
of the equator and we find discomfort in Inquisition.
Every conquered race leaves more behind
after the complete destruction of the temple.
Left alone Before the Messiah without witness
and relief we stretch bass strings around
mountains and tenor in the valley where steps
hang fear above the snowline where bitter fires
scratch warplanes and parachutes drop out
darkness and left behind floral candles
and Athena, her war paint and perfume
left behind as casual sex pierced by blue sky
as the water spout lifts away from our lights.
We strike the flame with illumination.
We are not insane to want more
than another day without relief
from the anxiety we are not good
today as we gather the parts,
stretch to meet their edges.
We did not plan this discomfort.
The earth did not step back and
refuse our entrance or even pause.
We were ground to pieces with
Red Cross hope and supreme
neglect by those who are paid
to love and never forget their due.
There is nothing we can dream
when the children are raped by
social devils and teachers wait
for colorless blasts to turn blank
and of course we recall nothing
but the blood stains on our shirt
and the wrath of our fingers
masturbating in quiet church yards.
Hope lives with hand held mirrors
and the last fake sky presented
to keep us drugged with her beautiful
breasts and nipples that are always
milked and sweet like the drugs
we hid in our backyard fort.
3.
Every where I searched later
for the gold doubloons we
found nothing but bones
and blind ash left over from last
season when the fire left
its own verse in the mud.
"Critique of Pure Reason"
Part V and Last
"There is no excellent beauty that hath
not some strangeness in the proportion."
-- Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), "Of Beauty"
Aesthetics
How lovely that wild pungent light
revolves ordinary space into
non-Euclidian wings that Einstein
bore aloft to measure train tracks
in Vienna and then Hiroshima.
There is no geometry and theory
of lines. Reason has stopped. Intuition
sets up the colors out of invisible pallets.
We pretend to know the answers
and we call press conferences for lies.
There is no moral center. It has passed
away like the telegraph and museums.
2. Personal
Woman is the beauty I need.
I court her soft skin and lift
my self inside her open field
to begin landscapes again.
She with Shee-na-la-gig
creates air which is stone
of everything else left.
3.
New light fractures weak tales
of insufficient grief. Have you
forgotten how reason died
when famine broke open
that virus once called "the sweats,"
plague, AIDS or other infernal sore; --
that strange mask cannot revive
life where death voided mud
to shale and salt to domes?
We shine fame on soldiery
as Yeats' heroes fall again.
When we cross Ben Bulben
and step up giant Mountains
now plentiful in my life I will
know rocks as I kiss my hands.
I will discover every mystery
of life created second times.
We dissolve with prayer and
the primal ooze in a billion
years will be a sum of skin.
Even love's beauty as grace
in small millions of years had
an infinitesimal score but
gold and silver, copper and
spectators washed up on New
Zealand beach that new place
where life paused and restored
without prayers or comment.
Science won again and Darwin
walked with Freud and scattered
London imagists to compel World War I
to some appalling ditch dug as fortress
against the accidents of random death.
The machine gun replaced the sword.
All restored weapons are the same.
How marvelous atomic display
set in fuel rods and detonated
by complex flow charts written
in hieroglyphics by aliens some
say from Mars or better deposed
by Zuni's cross as prayer is
turquoise to another discourse.
I count the mirrors in my house.
Everyone had a double back, and
bent for creative fornication.
Sex is beauty, and love fucks
bare breeze into tempest to skirt
shifted waters from unpredicted flood
that left us dead and not buried.
Let us play the character Redemption
in our Morality play set down by Job?
4
Each lie jumps from ass of wind.
We are never ordinary but strange
quarks and not even fictional Q
can solve linear equations for love
without reference to what did not
happen and what was not true
as much as the pursuit of reformed
lives that became the character Dust.
We are planned by historical
hocus pocus, -- that broken trail
where we were judged by social
clues and the whole snaps
under the mass of various truth.
As fires rage over LA
The scarred tips of trees
bend in an unnatural lines
and drag love from gardens
to swallow the flavor of salmon
to mingle gold with grime
when ordinary waters
dirty from underground
are refused entry and
cause is a forgotten
dream tomorrow.
We have more air as page
of light writes stories we
force out with magic oath
conjured into true plane.
Geometry in revolt. Wisdom
has failed. Pure reason has
no reason to exist at all.
The character Hope weathers
into sand again and mud
into marble frames bought
after the Apocalypse fails.
Later, we bargain with demons
to build the tabernacle upon
the last mountain known to man.
5.
I welcome beauty and lust
my old words restored Amen.
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