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Norman dePlume Dec 2015
It behooves
               us to shape
the organization so we need not wait
until we hear from above the command,
but have the reins
               in our own hand,
if we are to prove
ourselves worthy of intense
              coming events.

Those who do not move,
do not notice their chains.

They say 'Order reigns
             in Berlin!
Our enemy is bigger today,
“a colossus with feet of clay,
crumbling from within.”

Capital is an historical necessity,
[Like the wooden plow and the chariot,]
but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

Atop smoking ruins, between the pools of blood and corpses of the murdered,
             the heroes of ‘order’ hasten to entrench their rule anew.
We’ve been drowned, and left behind a fertile residue.
The Rose that grows from “the muck of ages” still smells as sweet,
future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.

Rulers of Russia and America across the sea,
Germans, Belgians,
Poles and Frenchmen,
“you stupid henchmen!”
Don’t you understand,
“Your order is built on sand.”
The revolution says “I was, I am,
I will be.”
Freely translated from the speeches and writings of Rosa Luxembourg.
(c) 2015
Norman dePlume Dec 2015
Mandibles make their own hoarding,
but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under semiconductor-selected civilians,
but under civilians existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The trailer of all dead gentians weighs like a nipper
on the brandishes of the lob.
And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and thistles,
creating something that did not exist before, precisely

in such equipments of rheostat crochet they anxiously conjure up the spleens
of the past to their setter, bother from them nappies, bayonet slouches,
and cottons in *****-grinder to present this new scheme in wound hoarding
in timpanist-honored disincentive and borrowed larch.

Thus Luther put on the masseur of the Appearance Paul,
the Rhapsody of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the gully of the Rook Requisite and the Rook Empress,
and the Rhapsody of 1848 knew novelette bicentenary to do than to parsonage,
now 1789, now the rheostat trailer of 1793-95.

In like mantel, the belch who has learned a new larch always translates it backfire into his motor toot,
but he assimilates the spleen of the new larch
and exteriors himself freely in it only when he moves in it
without recalling the old and when he forgets his navy toot.
An N+7 from a passage by Marx,
copyright (c) 2015
#n7
Norman dePlume Dec 2015
"Unlock my heart with a sonnet-key?"1
The Rose Is Obsolete,
But,2 her perfect feet,3
A poem should not mean / But be4
An axe to break the frozen sea
within us.5
1 Robert Browning
2 William Carlos Williams
3 Christian Bök
4 Archibald MacLeish
5 Franz Kafka
Norman dePlume Dec 2015
Nature report it
Deny this
That time painting it
Even to overcome aesthetic as spell
Proclaimed to physical flat
Rather than an pretend fact
Fact flatness had to out
To the though had was
And at the same continue
A reordering of a line from Clement Greenberg.
Previously published in "Several Poems for Robert Smithson"
(c) EF and Norman dePlume, Beacon NY, 2015.

— The End —