the one I was with you
inhumed in chasms,
craters torn by atomic emotion
among chaos
No creator
reconstrues scar-tissue
to shine as birth-star.
Only to my sub-cerebral surprise
at last on blasé sorrow
dawns an iota of disgust
for life’s intemperance — — —
“As once you were”
with-hold your ghostly reference
to the sweet once were we— —
O leave me
my final illiteracy
of memory’s languour
my preference
to drift in lenient coma
an older Ophelia
on Lethe
Hot Cross Bum
Beyond a hell-vermilion
curtain of neon
lies the Bowery
a lurid lane
leading misfortune’s monsters
the human … race
altered to irrhythmic stagger
along the alcoholic’s
exit to Ecstasia.
Impersonal as wind astray
confluent tides of swarm
loiter
in non-resistance calm
through dilatory
night and day
crowds of the choicelessly corrupted
disoriented
The Bowery sanctuary’s
invasion by the vanquished
… in lazy anguish
Masquerade of Inexpressionism
inideate shutter
halting the bon-fire of the soul
from kindling the eyes
peep-holes of delight’s observatory
stoppled by hinterland stupor
lunging a sullen blow on sunlight
indirective
abortive ocular
reception of the objective
Bum-bungling of actuality
exchanging
an inobvious real
for over-obvious irreal
faces of Inferno
peering from shock-absorbent
torsos
alternate with raffish saints’
eleemosynary innocence
Blowsy angels
lief to leer
upon crystal horizons
shelves of liquiescent ‘beef’*
—staple fodder of their fanciful fall
a Brilliance all of bottles
pouring a benison
of internal rain
leaving a rainbow in your brain
Hoary rovers
ignoring all but despicable directions,
shift through intentional trend of busymen
Their sailing, flailing limbs
of disequilibrium
clutching at wobbly banisters
to Elysium
Apart from them
a-sway the curb
one wry heckler
of an averse universe
spiring a querulous arm
announces the Tremendous
unto his vinous auditorium
of vast unfuture
A universe
to which (dead to the world)
he is ideologically deceased
graduate of indiscipline
post-graduate of procrastination
a prophet of Babble-on
shouts and mutters
to earless gutters
as inattentively
snobs of inertia
turning a dorsal retaliation
on closed entrance
block door-way stairs
with shoeless tiers
of Bandage-footed thins
lifting so daintily
the lusty lice
from their uncovered shins
At last
in a lucent grocery
the murmur of the mass
is become lingua audibly
in sodden-mouthed excuses
One lone lout
flecked with opal bruises
of belaboured bone
on my comprehension
pinning my ear to his desperation
crying,
“It isn’t my fault”
—A truth psychiatry
weighs courteously.
How idly
even
infinite dole
of pity
yearns your way
for none can enter
to the sot’s account
one cent’s worth
of Salvation
… that inborn fortune
self control
Despite that nowhere else
is Bumhood
handled with such gentleness
an onfall
of somewhat heavenly loaves
for your loafing
is the fashion
conditional compassion:
appreciation
of your publicity value
to the Bowery
So here comes help
here comes regeneration
—even a little alimentary fun
you shall not be left in the lurch
Some passing church
or social worker
confides to a brother
how he has managed to commandeer
a certain provision
of hot-cross buns
his earnestness
hushed by the hiccough holocaust
of otiose
hoboes hob-nobbing
with obtund oafs
in candid cupidity
and oathy psalmody
optimists conducting their poll
of the total calories in alcohol
or describing the sweet inward
upward of “creepy Pete”*
upward—
a flight into celestial resort
to alight in visceral discord
Sample interpolations of the Absolute
Physiognomy exhibiting
—the unseen pallor of a Negro
a Nordic’s inner darkness
a silly smile immune to meaning
streaming the static transit of the street
to indecision’s crossroads
where zest for zenith
zig-zag to zero
meet:
the egoless eagerness
of priestly patience
for laic participance
with
impious mystics of the other extreme
shrunken illuminati
sunken
rather than arisen
avid for infamous incense
of Bacchus’ raucous breath
avoiding narrow breadth
of theology’s
protect-drapery
not loathing
their ragged habitat
of indwelt rifts of clothing
divers failures
to fit personality
in envelopes of rigidity
So wonder why
defeat
by dignity of the majority
oft reveals
in close-up of inferno face
a nobler origin
than practicality’s elite
Yet, if perchance
observed in down-sight from tall tower
lost it is
in grey dis-synthesis
of our adamic insects’
collision with confusion
Warfare in allure
of church and bar
oppositional altars
of cross and carousal
both irreconcilable
to well-faring flesh
As if should wish Evolution,
some esoteric union
of Mission and gin-mill
must breed eventually
someones more amenable
to ecstasy
than this unlikely spill
of God’s mysteriously
variously
retarded children.
Nonetheless
Ardent self-crossing
kneeling-scaling
of steps inciting even the accursed
to church
proves unavailing
for visionary drunkard
inspired
to search intuitively desired
uni-identity
of primary
satieties of craving
Holy anomoly!
the gin-mill eased him out
the church now chucks him out.
The while
on high
disputing
the sheer beauty
Catholicism
once patroned
to entice humanity
a dull-dong bell
thuds out admonishment
to worship
atonic metal
detonation
tolling a drudgery
of exoteric
redemption
whose cadence
of illenience
transforms the cross bewailed
to flammable timber
for over-heating
Hades
waylaying for branding
indirigible bums
with the hot-cross
of ovenly buns.
Death is about to egress from the church
an undertaker’s ebon aide
lurks in the portal-to-the-immortal
Saunters steep steps
to fling wide open the glass
doors of an obesely curtained hearse
prior to reception
of consecrated corpse
dross of the soul
gross of the soil
Concordantly
a ravenous truck
comes to a churning stand-still
before the pious facade;
hiding the invitatory conveyance
and carriages of florists’ grievance.
Collecting refuse more profuse than man
the City’s circulatory
sanitary apostles
a-leap to ash-cans
apply their profane ritual
to offal
Dust to dust
Even a putrescent Galaxy
could not be left where it lay
to disgust
Scrapped are remains
empty cans remain.
And always on the trodden street
—the communal cot—
embalmed in rum
under an unseen
baldachin of dream
blinking his inverted sky
of flagstone
prone
lies the body of the flop
where’er he drop.
One still savors
the favor of Eros
In this sore cemetery of the Comatose
here lies…
the belier
of disbelief
in this brief
bystander
Aptest attainer
to apex of Chimera
Inamorato
of incognito ignis fatuus
fatuitous
possessor of thoroughfare
O rare behaviour
a folly-wise scab of Metropolis
pounding with caressive jollity
a breastless slab
his cerebral fumes
assuming
arms’ enlacement
decorously garbed
he’s lovin’up the pavement
—interminable paramour
of horizontal stature
Venus-sans-vulva—
A vagabond in delirium
aping the rise and fall
of ocean
of inhalation
of coition.
An Aged Woman
The past has come apart
events are vagueing
the future is inexploitable
the present pain.
Not even pain has that precision
with which it struck in youth-time
More like moth
eroding internal organs
hanging or falling down
in a spoiled closet
Does your mirror Bedevil you
or is the impossible
possible to senility
enabling the erstwhile agile
narrow silhouette of self
to hold in huge reserve
this excessive incognito
of a Bulbous stranger
only to be exorcised by death
Dilation has entirely eliminated
your long reality.
Mina Loy
July 12th
1984
Moreover, the Moon — — —
Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.
Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.
Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,
touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles
Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.
V
EXCAVATIONS AND PRECISIONS
(PROSE 1914–1925)
Loy’s grave marker in a woodland cemetery in Aspen, Colorado (designed by Herbert Bayer; Franz Berko photograph)
Aphorisms on Futurism
DIE in the Past
Live in the Future.
THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.
IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.
AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.
THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, form the basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.
LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.
OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate them.
YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.
BUT the Future is only dark from outside.
Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.
FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself—
FOR the smallest people live in the greatest houses.
BUT the smallest person, potentially, is as great as the Universe.
WHAT can you know of expansion, who limit yourselves to compromise?
HITHERTO the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small.
BUT in the Future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity, the great man proportionately must be tremendous—a God.
LOVE of others is the appreciation of one’s self.
MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.
THE Future is limitless—the past a trail of insidious reactions.
LIFE is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself.
TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.
THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.
HE can compress every æsthetic principle in one line.
THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.
LOOKING on the past you arrive at “Yes,” but before you can act upon it you have already arrived at “NO.”
THE Futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping-stone to stone of creative explorations; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.
THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith.
TODAY is the crisis in consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously
accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.
CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.
LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.
UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole.
MISERY is in the disintegration of Joy;
Intellect, of Intuition;
Acceptance, of Inspiration.
CEASE to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.
NOT to be a cipher in your ambiente,
But to color your ambiente with your preferences.
NOT to accept experience at its face value.
BUT to readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will.
THESE are the primary tentatives towards independence.
MAN is a slave only to his own mental lethargy.
YOU cannot restrict the mind’s capacity.
THEREFORE you stand not only in abject servitude to your perceptive consciousness—
BUT also to the mechanical re-actions of the subconsciousness, that rubbish heap of race-tradition—
AND believing yourself free—your least conception is colored by the pigment of retrograde superstitions.
HERE are the fallow-lands of mental spatiality that Futurism will clear—
MAKING place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self.
TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.
THEY are empty except of your shame.
AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness.
THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.
THROUGH derision of Humanity as it appears—
TO arrive at respect for man as he shall be—
ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism
Leaving all those
—Knick-knacks.—
Feminist Manifesto
The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate
Women if you want to realise yourselves—you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval—all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go—are you prepared for the Wrench—? There is no half-measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition
Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades & uniform education—you are glossing over Reality.
Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you—Is that all you want ?
And if you honestly desire to find your level without prejudice—be Brave & deny at the outset—that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the equal of man—
for