Emotional postures proceed through fashions
At least in the post-Gutenberg age
When trends can circulate somewhat rapidly
Hence modern times commenced with the primal eldest sin
Of dividing the human family into colonies
Into the abstract strata of empire and subject
With their destructive and exploitative concrete effects
And thus the extractive conglomerations of modernity
Imitated the style of ancient instances
And hence in the eighteenth century everybody
Who was anybody wanted to be a stoical Roman
Stoicism the stately attitude of imperial hand-washers
For the upright pity the downtrodden
Whom they themselves have trodden upon
All the tragedies ended
With somebody falling on a sword
Hence the plighting of sacred honor
In the Declaration of Independence
Whose primary author was memorialized
By a little Pantheon in the District of Columbia
Patrician upon the little mount in Albemarle county
Holder of enslaved workers and lovers
But when the time came to commemorate Lincoln
Not a founding patriarch but a paschal lamb
A martyr dead for our sin
All the hipsters had gone over to Greece
Hence the Olympian temple on the mall
Things never begin in history
They always pick up from something else
Wherefore a few wispy souls
Like sighing scions of Petrarch
Unmoved by martial strutting
Savored the pang of sensibility
And lamented softly that a flower
Should be born to blush unseen
But a signal moment came
When Childe Harold left Iberia
To sojourn in Hellas
But there are always earlier beginnings
Napoleon idolized Alexander
More than he did Caesar
And he like Alexander conquered Egypt
But when immediately upon the fall of Buonaparte
The Elgin marbles including friezes
Rescued or plundered from the Parthenon
Arrived in England
Egyptomania which nevertheless persisted in France
Was overshadowed by Philhellenism among Britons
And thus Keats born into a livery stable
Plebeian of Hampstead Heath
Could discover that heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest
For she the bas-relief heifer
Mourns her imminent demise
Being led by the mysterious priest
To the perennially green altar of sacrifice
And the age of melancholy had arrive
Ushered of course by Lord Byron
Who would enter a fashionable gathering
With that peculiar gait
He spent his brief life long trying to conceal
Outward sign of his inward Sophoclean flaw or flaws
To take up a fretful posture in the corner
Awaiting the flock of female and male admirers
To congregate around him
And the heroes so tragic and Byronic
Quested after their white whales
Americans being typically behind the times
Or more punctually glowered on weathering heights
Or brooded in lowlands over their noble
If self-induced lacerations
But short-lived Keats the commoner remained
The true the blushful connoisseur of melancholy
Whom the sensitive aristocrats Shelley and especially Byron
Treated disrespectfully in private letters
But they tried to change their tune when he died
Shelley with a noble elegy
Byron with a flippant parody of Cock Robin
Both insisting with astonishing insensitivity
That critics not consumption had killed John Keats
A mosquito bite killed Byron in Greece
And Shelley’s death more ambiguous
Came with a sudden storm at sea
And the little bark Ariel foundered
And before long the romantic age of dejection
Gave way to Victorian pieties
Thus Tennyson devoted his career
To obsession with the death of Arthur
And Dickens to depicting his English eccentrics
Neither one expressive of
An aching heart or the pain of drowsy numbness
More now a matter of guilt and atonement
For the timeghost had drifted beyond
Moping dreamers and atheist rebels
To reside with evangelical fervor and imperialist grit
Feeling became religion and religion feeling
And the finest among them could not stop for death
But death stopped obligingly for them
And it needed France to discover
The ennui of yearning for the ineffable
Amid the sparkling jewelry and the shopping arcades
Inspired by the American prophet of the nevermore
America driven for profit
More compulsively than even its European conquerors
But the great genius of the fin de siècle
Was Irish and found gaiety
At the fraught intersection of art politics and sex
But power dedicated to earnest hypocrisy
Rejected the importance of irony
And punished the poet for his failure to comply
And a new century began with old miseries
Of empire industry and command
But this grim trio brought hitherto unimagined horrors
Of holocaust and mass destruction
Giving rise to an age of anxiety
And anxiety induces depression
That far exceeds the decorous melancholy
Of being too happy in a songbird’s happiness
But one slender mercy obtained
In that twentieth century of ungainly brutality
The blues manner of madness sadness libido hope and loss
Product of survivors of the colonialist fury
Torn from their mother to toil
In Mississippi Virginia and Georgia
And yet even by the rivers of Babylon
They raised their voices in song
And for a time a brief alternative obtained
Blessed by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith
But was soon subsumed within the systems
Of politics and mass production
And convenience and mass consumption
From which it was never free anyway
Diversion for gangsters tycoons ordinary people
Functional nodes in a totalizing system
Mickey Mouse Garbo Gary Cooper
Beatles Stones Nashville and Motown
Culture an industrial product done on the cheap
And technologies chemical electrical and digital
Deadly polymers and merciless algorithms
Absorbed all lives and all life
In an economy of lies
A religion of weaponry
The dictatorship of market share
The idolatry of data
For now sadness is a clinical
That is to say systemic malady
And all are citizens of the Prozac nation
Ask your doctor about the panacea Pharmacorp
And many self-medicate with dismal enthusiasms
For cults for demagogues for entertainments
And for mostly for sports intramural and international
All is conflict
Somebody must lose
That’s common knowledge ask the man on the street
So hurray for the home team
Death to the opponent
Who in opposing deserves painful death
Torture the enemy
Scour the enemy from the face of the earth
Man woman and child
We have the technology
Nothing on earth means any damned thing
So success above all and victory and vengeful butchery
And drown your sorrows in lustful blood
And sleep the long sleep of the opiated