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MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs,
        Going along,
        Going along,
On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad-
The boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling squares of bayonet points.

Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;
A million, ten million, singing, "I am ready."
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee.

I heard one say, "I am ready to be killed."
I heard another say, "I am ready to be killed."
O sunburned clear-eyed boys!
I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,
        You-and the flag!
And my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat
        When you go by,
You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, "I am ready to be killed."

They are hunting death,
Death for the one-armed mastoid kaiser.
They are after a Hohenzollern head:
There is no man-hunt of men remembered like this.

The four big brothers are out to ****.
France, Russia, Britain, America-
The four republics are sworn brothers to **** the kaiser.

Yes, this is the great man-hunt;
And the sun has never seen till now
Such a line of toothed and tusked man-killers,
In the blue of the upper sky,
In the green of the undersea,
In the red of winter dawns.
Eating to ****,
Sleeping to ****,
Asked by their mothers to ****,
Wished by four-fifths of the world to ****-
To cut the kaiser's throat,
To hack the kaiser's head,
To hang the kaiser on a high-horizon gibbet.

And is it nothing else than this?
Three times ten million men thirsting the blood
Of a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings?
Three times ten million men asking the blood
Of a child born with his head wrong-shaped,
The blood of rotted kings in his veins?
If this were all, O God,
I would go to the far timbers
And look on the gray wolves
Tearing the throats of moose:
I would ask a wilder drunk of blood.

Look! It is four brothers in joined hands together.
        The people of bleeding France,
        The people of bleeding Russia,
        The people of Britain, the people of America-
These are the four brothers, these are the four republics.

At first I said it in anger as one who clenches his fist in wrath to fling his knuckles into the face of some one taunting;
Now I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and over again at night, among the mountains, by the seacombers in storm.
I say now, by God, only fighters to-day will save the world, nothing but fighters will keep alive the names of those who left red prints of bleeding feet at Valley Forge in Christmas snow.
On the cross of Jesus, the sword of Napoleon, the skull of Shakespeare, the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln, or any sign of the red and running life poured out by the mothers of the world,
By the God of morning glories climbing blue the doors of quiet homes, by the God of tall hollyhocks laughing glad to children in peaceful valleys, by the God of new mothers wishing peace to sit at windows nursing babies,
I swear only reckless men, ready to throw away their lives by hunger, deprivation, desperate clinging to a single purpose imperturbable and undaunted, men with the primitive guts of rebellion,
Only fighters gaunt with the red brand of labor's sorrow on their brows and labor's terrible pride in their blood, men with souls asking danger-only these will save and keep the four big brothers.

Good-night is the word, good-night to the kings, to the czars,
        Good-night to the kaiser.
The breakdown and the fade-away begins.
The shadow of a great broom, ready to sweep out the trash, is here.

One finger is raised that counts the czar,
The ghost who beckoned men who come no more-
The czar gone to the winds on God's great dustpan,
The czar a pinch of nothing,
The last of the gibbering Romanoffs.

Out and good-night-
The ghosts of the summer palaces
And the ghosts of the winter palaces!
Out and out, good-night to the kings, the czars, the kaisers.

Another finger will speak,
And the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million sleeping-waking ghosts,
The kaiser will go onto God's great dustpan-
The last of the gibbering Hohenzollerns.
Look! God pities this trash, God waits with a broom and a dustpan,
God knows a finger will speak and count them out.

It is written in the stars;
It is spoken on the walls;
It clicks in the fire-white zigzag of the Atlantic wireless;
It mutters in the bastions of thousand-mile continents;
It sings in a whistle on the midnight winds from Walla Walla to Mesopotamia:
Out and good-night.

The millions slow in khaki,
The millions learning Turkey in the Straw and John Brown's Body,
The millions remembering windrows of dead at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania Court House,
The millions dreaming of the morning star of Appomattox,
The millions easy and calm with guns and steel, planes and prows:
        There is a hammering, drumming hell to come.
        The killing gangs are on the way.

God takes one year for a job.
God takes ten years or a million.
God knows when a doom is written.
God knows this job will be done and the words spoken:
Out and good-night.
        The red tubes will run,
        And the great price be paid,
        And the homes empty,
        And the wives wishing,
        And the mothers wishing.

There is only one way now, only the way of the red tubes and the great price.

        Well...
Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon,
And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy.
Maybe the mothers of the world,
And the life that pours from their torsal folds-
Maybe it's all a lie sworn by liars,
And a God with a cackling laughter says:
"I, the Almighty God,
I have made all this,
I have made it for kaisers, czars, and kings."

Three times ten million men say: No.
Three times ten million men say:
        God is a God of the People.
And the God who made the world
        And fixed the morning sun,
        And flung the evening stars,
        And shaped the baby hands of life,
This is the God of the Four Brothers;
This is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia;
This is the God of the people of Britain and America.

The graves from the Irish Sea to the Caucasus peaks are ten times a million.
The stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets empty, the cripples, ten times a million.
The crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door panels of a hundred million homes.
Cows gone, mothers on sick-beds, children cry a hunger and no milk comes in the noon-time or at night.
The death-yells of it all, the torn throats of men in ditches calling for water, the shadows and the hacking lungs in dugouts, the steel paws that clutch and squeeze a scarlet drain day by day-the storm of it is hell.
But look! child! the storm is blowing for a clean air.

Look! the four brothers march
And hurl their big shoulders
And swear the job shall be done.

Out of the wild finger-writing north and south, east and west, over the blood-crossed, blood-dusty ball of earth,
Out of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean,
Out of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is making ready for a new thousand years.
The four brothers shall be five and more.

Under the chimneys of the winter time the children of the world shall sing new songs.
Among the rocking restless cradles the mothers of the world shall sing new sleepy-time songs.
Spanish

    –Eros: acaso no sentiste nunca
Piedad de las estatuas?
Se dirían crisálidas de piedra
De yo no sé qué formidable raza
En una eterna espera inenarrable.
Los cráteres dormidos de sus bocas
Dan la ceniza negra del Silencio,
Mana de las columnas de sus hombros
La mortaja copiosa de la Calma
Y fluye de sus órbitas la noche;
Victimas del Futuro o del Misterio,
En capullos terribles y magníficos
Esperan a la Vida o a la Muerte.
Eros: acaso no sentiste nunca
Piedad de las estatuas?–
    Piedad para las vidas
Que no doran a fuego tus bonanzas
Ni riegan o desgajan tus tormentas;
Piedad para los cuerpos revestidos
Del armiño solemne de la Calma,
Y las frentes en luz que sobrellevan
Grandes lirios marmóreos de pureza,
Pesados y glaciales como témpanos;
Piedad para las manos enguantadas
De hielo, que no arrancan
Los frutos deleitosos de la Carne
Ni las flores fantásticas del alma;
Piedad para los ojos que aletean
Espirituales párpados:
Escamas de misterio,
Negros telones de visiones rosas…
Nunca ven nada por mirar tan lejos!
    Piedad para las pulcras cabelleras
–Misticas aureolas–
Peinadas como lagos
Que nunca airea el abanico *****,
***** y enorme de la tempestad;
Piedad para los ínclitos espiritus
Tallados en diamante,
Altos, claros, extáticos
Pararrayos de cúpulas morales;
Piedad para los labios como engarces
Celestes donde fulge
Invisible la perla de la Hostia;
–Labios que nunca fueron,
Que no apresaron nunca
Un vampiro de fuego
Con más sed y más hambre que un abismo.–
Piedad para los sexos sacrosantos
Que acoraza de una
Hoja de viña astral la Castidad;
Piedad para las plantas imantadas
De eternidad que arrastran
Por el eterno azur
Las sandalias quemantes de sus llagas;
Piedad, piedad, piedad
Para todas las vidas que defiende
De tus maravillosas intemperies
El mirador enhiesto del Orgullo;

Apuntales tus soles o tus rayos!

Eros: acaso no sentiste nunca
Piedad de las estatuas?…

              English

    –Eros: have you never felt
Piety for the statues?
These chrysalides of stone,
Some formidable race
In an eternal, unutterable hope.
The sleeping craters of their mouths
Utter the black ash of silence;
A copious shroud of Calm
Falls from the columns of their arms,
And night flows from their eyesockets;
Victims of Destiny or Mystery,
In magnificent and terrible cocoons,
They wait for Life or Death.
Eros: have you never perhaps felt
Piety for the statues?
    Piety for the lives
That will not strew nor rend your battles
Nor gild your fiery truces;
Piety for the bodies clothed
In the solemn ermine of Calm,
The luminous foreheads that endure
Their marble wreaths, grand and pure,
Weighty and glacial as icebergs;
Piety for the gloved hands of ice
That cannot uproot
The delicious fruits of the Flesh,
The fantastic flowers of the soul;
Piety for the eyes that flutter
Their spiritual eyelids:
Mysterious fish scales,
Dark curtains on rose visions…
For looking so far, they never see!
    Piety for the tidy heads of hair
–Mystical haloes–
Gently combed like lakes
Which the storm’s black fan,
Black and enormous, never thrashes;
Piety for the spirits, illustrious,
Carved of diamonds,
High, clear, ecstatic
Lightning rods on pious domes;
Piety for the lips like celestial settings
Where the invisible pearls of the Host gleam;
–Lips that never existed,
Never seized anything,
A fiery vampire
With more thirst and hunger than an abyss.
Piety for the sacrosanct sexes
That armor themselves with sheaths
From the astral vineyards of Chastity;
Piety for the magnetized footsoles
Who eternally drag
Sandals burning with sores
Through the eternal azure;
Piety, piety, pity
For all the lives defended
By the lighthouse of Pride
From your marvelous raw weathers:

Aim your suns and rays at them!

Eros: have you never perhaps felt
Pity for the statues?
Alexander Klein Aug 2013
sought
desperate
and double-sought. at last
inside embracing entombment
the skull-dome of earth my
mother
discovers the maiden intellect kidnapped by further
tomorrows and slakes my thirst on the
blood-brain beneath the hills of nemea.
am i the sa
vior the damsel or the beast?
curdling a slimy finger down the vaginaless brain
long veins delay my knuckles into nightingales between
serrated orifice-incisors made of thought and
all my hunting knives and bludgeons bring no unconsciousness to it. memories
they say
are as much like the present as a lion likes
cat food. The sleeping woman is about to become
cat food. cave shadows cloak what little of her is left
to imagination: nearly dead, nearly
beautiful.
does that brain-like lion stalk impenetrable as hungry
as intelligence as forceful as the crucibles of lust as
remote
as wastelands in the unforgiven breast?
i could asphyxiate that hurdle given resolve
i could lambast a mortal lion with my palms but not this
facsimile of fortitude forcefields intact. through
the nose of the wind and the mouth of the water i found my way
to the eyesockets of the very dirt; a veil
about my brain but
saw it still.
stillness
surrounded.
sought
some sign upon the smooth sphere an opening into
light or lifewaters or cold grey electricity but
no thing could penetrate that sheath of thought -- though it may yearn for fornication
some brains never breed but
condense in darkness
hermaphroditic, hunting through the silent greek city-states for
beautiful bloodrivers. there is no lion no trodden
angel weeping in a cave only
impervious struggling eternal meandering and the jar
of misdirection. thanks, hera
but it looks like you've been foiled once again and this time by your husband's headcold who said
only your brain can outthink your brain. she's a smart owl and
she's right:
every time i think i've reached my goal and
allow a little fortune or fulfillment to escape my maze eleven novel tasks
coagulate beyond my calendars of navigation. blood fills the veins of my
brain engorging it and pressuring it into questionable *******. for
if the sun breeds maggots in a dead lion
then i've emerged from the earth's crevice
victorious and spent. but there's more
to the story as i crawl off down the metaphor
wrapped beneath the brain's skinned hide its
vestigial thoughts arrest me thinking i
know, i know
eleven more sunrises until death.
thanks, brain.
A pounding
seizures and nausea
violence, fountains of cascading
mankind's bleeding, gushing
puncture wounds of wine
Dreamkillers out of their way to wreak
smoldering, rancid havoc
Epilepsy and ******* muscles spasms
Brain-tissue scarring from the rocking
between heavenhell and deathlife
Give me your soul and I'll
twist it into strands with which I
hang myself and make a tourniquet around your
neck
Dancing or slaying be one
I **** and lascerate the remnants of my
skin, my soul stretched across the
traintracks, waiting for pleasure
pleasurepleasure in gore and flesh
and wriggling maggots in the eyesockets
of children
Too bad
we all have to wake up come down
inandout of this horrific flying breathing fantasy
rapture of adulterated movement
Sin in all its glory licks the black flames
ashestoashes and dust into mud
blud across the vacuum
McKala Hanes Mar 2018
As she stares at the stars and you stare at her,
You wonder what she sees in them.
It’s the stars that make her smile like that.
You want to wash your hair with stardust,
Wear a necklace of a shimmering constellation,
Shove entire planets in your eyesockets,
And burst into a girl-supernova
So that maybe, just maybe, she will love you, too.
bucky Jul 2014
wring your mismatched hands together they don't belong to you but they're still yours
you watch old reels, the war replaying on a silver screen
relearning a past you still don't remember (your hair used to be short, but you like it better long)
your smile is crooked when you look at him
you don't know if it's fondness or hatred (or something in the middle,the point between rage and bone-breaking love)
he'll never understand how easy it is to make men into machines
but the blueprints for your breathing patterns are hidden away in ones and zeroes in the back of your mind
your tongue and teeth are stained with your old body, ten thousand lifetimes ago you still feel your arm sometimes
ghost aches haunting your every step
when you close your eyes you see an ashtray, blood filling your eyesockets like saltwater
you've forgotten about that night (1942, the war playing in the background as you looked at him, soft around the edges) stars falling from his palms into your chest
you're an ampersand, your fingers interlocked with his
when you ask him what it was like
(you aren't sure what you mean, but he is) he says, soft around the edges,okay
and it's enough
war isn't pretty, it's a tragedy and so are you but it's enough for now
press your fingers into the sway of his back
cough russian winter into his lungs
and try to forget about it
i think it is fairly obvious what this poem is about
bucky Oct 2014
there's blood on my hands, and
liquor on your tongue
this is what true love tastes like
****** in the pews
you are ash exhumed and i'm a lit match
cigarette firepower burning bodies in front of churches
crying holy, holy

are you scared yet?
stars in your eyes, in the palms of your hands
kissing the corpse road
breaths scraping against your ribcage on the way out
someone else's hands in your throat on the way down
crying holy, holy

i want fireproof lungs i want
flowers planted in my eyesockets
make me a garden like no other
oh god, oh god
im coughing up leaves and twigs and
grave markers

(you have a flair for the dramatic
used to hold up pictures of my bleeding gums and say,
you're so beautiful
am i beautiful now, sweetheart?are you?
can you face yourself in the mirror, sweetheart?)

stop it, stop screaming,
you aren't a holy verse
twenty dead roses on a empty coffin, and
four horsemen of the apocalypse, and
death at the bottom of a swimming pool
crying holy, holy
mal monson Dec 2018
they let their sticky humid hands
hold my glitching hologram body
against the scratchy playhouse
walls and drag their clammy
claws where no child should
think to rub all the while
whispering into my vacant ears
how they would beat me and
bite me and cut me and kick me
if anyone were to ever find out
our little game as tapeworm
tears sludged from my sickly
sweet rotting eyesockets and
down my shiny shaking dust
stained cheeks silently over my
cold and closing throat and
when my dad finally ripped the
splintering wooden door across
the sandy shifting floor i was so
pale pink blue i could have been
six hours dead save for my
fracturing porcelain and
plexiglass heart destructive and
bashing and shattering itself
through my frail and brittle
crumbling ribcage whispering to
me how badly my dad would
scream at me for the way we
were playing
Jenny Oct 2013
"I'll let you in on a Secret - I don't know when I'm joking."

We go to a fancy-type restaurant. A nice sit-down place. My baby blues are bottled on dark wood shelves and this isn't a detail that you plan to miscount for. Waiters in black ties and the plates are already on the tables and I know that you are relentless in their shining reflections.

"Wine and Dine my Sensibility."

My seventeen-year-old skin does not belong here. Follicles producing my scent are premature, to say the least. Cultivated romance looms beyond a horizon of pale-brown clouds littered with mid-highway makeouts - I expect you to paint me a brand-spanking-new Southwestern sky.

"Let's talk about You" -
A past-prime Adam's Apple says to me. Gnarled birds' nests perch atop my faintly skin-encased splinters - I flex in hopes of a migration, but not too
Far
Down
S
   o
       u
          t
                h

"They're coming."

Barely flinching teeth rattle around my peripheral and then You Are Gone! - or perhaps I am. We drown quickly in dim red-lighting, brick-laid air swallows and belches out a humidified and much sweatier you and I - and I'm getting turned on.

"You look nice today,"
they chant. Spay-legged spiders tumble out of dank eyesockets and nest somewhere deeeeeeeep in my brain tissue.
"Yellow looks good on a jealous, jealous girl-"
You laugh and call them back home.
Lock eyes with me as I impale upon a salad fork.

"Talk ***** to me."

Third-World Countries have been delicately dropped into what I thought were love poems to you. Vines grow around your mouth, soggy with the meal that I think is over. They chase each other through your teeth and I want to strangle myself with their slim and tender necks - like you wish I had. Dark green darlings giggle in my direction - such a Naive Little Girl!

"Ha."

Six lines later and I'm reeling you in.
Savio Mar 2013
It was 10pm when I decided to leave my apartment
there was snow on the ground
patchy from the dry cold half winter half sun heat
I decided to check the mail
I had been drinking three dollar wine for hours staring at old paintings on the wall
paintings of kansas
paintings of tornadoes
paintings of Van Gough
I had written a poem on the wall
dedicated to the cockroaches and lamp posts of new york city
I wrote it in lipstick and spanish
I opened the mailbox
I felt the moon on my shoulder
I saw a shadow that wasn't mine behind a fence
it was from Florida
a woman I had once fallen in love with
with her brown hair curly like that of smoke of a cigarette
it read “i miss you”
I had decided to die right there
with the half melted snow
the half grown grass that was green and brown
the cigarette butts
the broken glass
with the moon still on my shoulder
a thousand miles behind winters blanket of clouds
I decided to die there
lighting a cigarette
wet from my lips
I lied down
with the orange letter in my hand
with the orange cigarette lightbug in my mouth
smoke dancing out like Amazonian women in heat
I pictured swamps
I pictured the city on fire
I pictured her naked in my hands
giving her self up to me
letting me have her lips and her legs and her stomach and her love
in the distant
behind the city buildings ears and belly button lint and sirens and swing music and the flickering of beer bottle caps and the burning of tobacco
from lips to tongue to throat to lung
then back out
in a ball of stretched smoke
headed only to the clouds up above
which angels and the moon slept behind
It would have been good to die there
the ground felt good
I thought of Texas
rivers
cow skulls on top of lamps
I thought of Mother and her
rose bottled liquor
I hought of Father
and his eyes that were enormous with
poverty and Tommy Hilfiger sweaters
I thought of
Her
alone in florida
full of sun
full of days and full of nights
I thought of Death
and how he must envy me
I smoke cigarettes to make it easy on him
he knows I wont go
without a fight
without spit in his hollow eye
without my blood
on his fur coat
when he comes in winter on a horse
or a Cadillac from the 1930's
I thought of many brave men
drinking their hearts
their bellies
their eyesockets to sleep
with Tall bottles of gloriously cheap whiskey
I thought of war
and I thought of lighting another cigarette
but it was cold
and I decided to go inside
with my windows
with my Van Gogh paintings
with my blind cat who purred at the dishwasher
kfaye Aug 2012
5
today i sliced my thumb open
doing something stupid

i

try to remember
to never

push against broken glass with bare hands

or slide my fingers into sharp places



but

today i sliced my face open

and

pushed my way into the front of my skull with my forefinger and thumb
holding the flesh open

i felt the bony ridge browline, with the pads of my fingertips

were the contours were not smooth as they should have been but
mountainous and irregular from

old

injury

you wouldn't know it to look at me but my
skull is irregular

and asymmetrical.

and
just a little bit jagged.




feel it and you can tell.



i could tell. i





sliced.
my face


open.



to tell. i




opened up my
skin

just to catch a glimpse.

at my

crooked eyesockets
and


they were hideous.




and





but you wouldn't know it just by my face.




or by the small scar beside my left eye that falls directly in the valley made by a crow's foot talon

i wonder

if
the wrinkles
are
from the scars or
if
the scars are just
conveniently

placed- today i sliced my face open


and
pushed my way into the front of my skull with my forefinger and thumb


with all the
viscera

of a madman

i've heard

the difference between medicine
and poison

is

in the dose.



but



i
never
stopped

breathing.

sometimes
breathing
­is all

you
can

do. and

i
sliced my

face




open
to
catch

a vision


i
guess

that
was
a pretty crazy thing
to do.





and
i wonder what
Emma May 2011
Sometimes...
The world closes you into its arms and you get freaked out.
You always wanted that feeling of being held... but it isn't worth losing your sight...

Sometimes things are dark.
One wonders, while they watch
another blindly ***** at air,
what one might find if they
adjusted.

Sometimes the air is black,
black like behind your eyesockets,
filling your lungs like the tar you swore to never touch-
so deep it seems to seep from your very pores,
seep..... and harden.
So much for flying, there goes your monstrous visions of
avoidance
You are the statue, frozen, groping blindly at nothing for eternity
(not that you would have necessarily moved very far)



Still, though, your tears stain the pictures of people you miss. To you the world is boundless, but you seem to see it differently than all of them...

Still, though, MY tears stain your pictures. To me the world is boundless, but I seem to see it differently than all of you...
Vyiirt'aan Nov 2017
A calm winter night.

The street lights at the window sill did not seem to embrace my room as I was seated beyond my desk.

The unlit screen still seemed bright for when it carved its image in my eyes,
The glass display shattering in millions of shards piercing through my paper skull.

An etymology of communication, the relation of electrical currents through my crevasses,
The empty eyesockets in my skull ridden with blood, pus and ink, oozing out of my empty casket on what remained of the abandoned framework in the chair, corroded to unidentifiable bits of gore

A steaming pile of putrid mass desecrating the serenity of the chamber,
decorating the walls with mould and algae

A murky portrait indeed.

Tangling vines carress the oxidated heaps of sticks and bones, they feel it, they long for it
Mutilating the sheer remains of contorted steel and ivory as the ink chants its final tune.
It feels unfinished
I have purged my sacred atmosphere

of billious and twisted countenances

the only one spitting bile this time

is myself



i ***** poison into the eyes of my love

but she keeps on kissing my aching skin

she says she loves me still

even though her eyesockets are but hollow gapes at this moment



i'm so scared to leave this prison

the place i have been living for the past 100 years or so

i destroy the passion i once felt for my kindred

so that i may leave with you, on our ship to the stars



let me be your moon at midnight

as you are the all-encompassing vacuum in my heart

let me enter you and combust within you

it is the reason for my creation



i dream of writing your forbidden name into my skin

your secret name, hidden even from your perception

for if you hear it, it will be wounded

it has happened before

it must not be uttered

i only scream it inside when i shatter and die within you



kiss me now



kiss me with those lips that you we're born with, but that belong to me
mike Apr 2017
When the walls of your home
Start breathin when ur alone
Then at least u know
That one of you is still alive.
When ur disposed and
You're decomposin
And you're leavin this life like
Ur flesh from ur bone
Then ur empty eyesockets
Start searchin for another
Dismantled jaw
To talk to all night

I wish that I had
The grandure of those walls
To keep me
Company all night.

When you only talk alone
Then nowhere can be home
And you pleasure your flesh for
The day
That your flesh finally
Separates from ur bone.
mm Mm mm Mmmm.......

— The End —