Rage for Order
Somwhere beyond the scorched gable end and the burt-out buses there is a poet indulging his wretched rage for order -- or not as the case may be; for his is a dying art, an eddy of semantic scruples in an unstructurable sea. He is far from his people, and the fitful glare of his high window is as nothing to our scattered glass. His posture is grandiloquent and depreciating, like this, his diest ashes, hhis talk of justice and his mother the rhetorical device or an etiolated empereor-- Nero if you prefer, no mother there. ". . .And this in the face of love, death, and the wages of the poor . . ." If he is silent, it is the silence of enforced humility; if anxious to be heard, it is the anxiety of a last word when the drums start; for his is a dying art. Now watch me as I make history, Watch as i tear down to build up with a deseperate love, knowing it cannot be long now till i have need of his desperate ironies. Derek Mahon Comicopia The Codex Jitter's Poem Library