There is no awakening. Outside the cave
Light shadows in the sun, a blinding
Muck veils desolation in the vein-bled,
Good men, stumps of the naked forests,
And bird song drowned by the droning dead,
Ignoble, this is no country for old men.
In the open, all lie freely, lacquered clean
Sunning social graces, shine pornographic,
Know truth is real yet, embalmed by speakers,
Pages, their flame a cross, churning in a mire,
Our glass cities run time mendaciously silent;
The euphony of the untruths, the bent sign.
In Catatonia words are watered but never
Change, sapped of meaning, seasons fall
By the handy green, the spring leaves, tipped
Off balance scaled to autumns teeming news;
The barren shores, breaks, bless the vacuum
Tubes, and pray a curse, fawn the head lamps.
In the homeless land anxious creatures divide.
The concrete utterance is picked to rubble.
The stones ground into sand and we ringing
In delight, moving mandrake, mobile cadavers,
Orbit to satellite are digging babylon down
In the false hood, ****** by the mortar.
The ruin architects mark, fork millions
Of tongues in tributary, as does a great
River from a stony source. The sterling
Feed their stock with tainted food, plants
Regenerate the mangled codex twining-tare;
Throws the babe with baptismal waters.
In the soulless land children peak abandoned,
They fall on temple steps by the golden mean.
We pattern the sky in the bold fabric of pity
And mercy but the strands fade out running;
Our cruel and only kind would rend the stars,
Would fallow Elysium, bleed gold to the vein.
How did we end mortal under the divining
Sun? Down base our provident ways watching?
We wave in fealty to the dominion of spins
And shadow, gussied Gods so proudly made,
Desolate, vain, air escaping to whisper;
We are sailing from Byzantium.
