It should be like hammering
It should not be like the distasteful image
That haunts the brain in an afternoon nap
How can you know which voice is mine not mine

Line up the cards and probe fate
But nobody can believe such nonsense
Birds in flight the entrails of a raven
And belief isn’t voluntary anyway

The noblest art from the basest superstition
Gods who raped earth girls
Who yet remained virgins
And song a loathsome incantation

But is poetry possible without creeping unreason
The drunkard’s pursuit of intentional derangement
The metallurgist was once a sorcerer
The poet the object of divine possession

Ambition is a toxin
A noxious psychotropic substance
Which discipline makes it possible to tolerate
Itself a dire addictive

Truth is a cliche and fact a commonplace
Did anyone ever know what holiness meant
The deadly apparition with a dozen dozen wings
The god with the head of a hippopotamus

One should engage in steering the world
Out of these catastrophic times
And not this fantasy-flogging
With long-stemmed roses

The doors of perception are filthy
As they always were
Only an optimist of the Enlightenment
Could have imagined them cleansed

Did anyone ever know what beauty meant
Or innocence
Which demon will you serve
Poetry or ennui