270. KYIV COMMIX: The Transmigration of Bad Souls – Part 4

Being a continuation, without interruption, of Part 3, and the story of The Bastard Wallace Wayne, The Batman Bruce Wayne’s illegitimate older half-brother

Read, o idle reader, just happing by, maying your wisdom to grow thereby…

Rain

A nine-sonnet dream cycle

by Saint Stephan

Phase I

Rain seems the appropriate metaphor

In the language of weathers metamor-

phosing to a lowering sibilant,

Hissing the passion garden impuissant,

For emptying intent over frayed wire

That wanes in the wind, reversing desire.

How shall I read this book, how mark the hours?

As though invoking alien powers

The city-voyaged wind floats the pages

Over high lectern, clutched at by stages

Of a fall through demented window scene

Flashing asphalt glistening red and green

In chatoyant gleams mixed with auto beams

And phantoms hovering past the grocers.

This is a call, and this is another

Call; answer the electronic missive,

For the illness unwinds, dropping long and

Slow, dropping long and slow through the cracked dream,

Turning inchoate vision to anguish

Shivering against the sick abradant

Of isolation, disconsolate, sun-

ken in damp video streaming, de-

caying under bondage girls in heat, gar-

risoned in city-spanning citadel; Hell

Is solitude in comic book gridding,

Obscene colors jumping from box to box,

Yearnings raved in sordid simulacra

That halt mid-block for Joe Arabica.

Violet triumphs of genital flowers

Exploding the mind’s nebula showers

Flood with diabolical sewer swell

Memories’ tides merging waters with Hell.

Traffic drowned, city sunken in its streets

And pain writhing between the come-soaked sheets

Mix stillness and panic, I peer at Hell

Losing the sense of what I want to tell:

Ad images fall and money gods drown

And waves of Hollywood bring carnage down

Turn city nocturne into a vast sea

Of floating bodies and manmade debris.

Death ships love’s freights through his tolls on barges;

High portholes blast out under shattering

Phase II

Sky. Birdless wings lop, carving the toxic

Squall, ugly, sickeningly hideous,

Monstrously deformed, perpetrating de-

icide, smothering their chief of beasts in

The wet slime of atmospheric paste, and

I see the city drowning in the night,

I watch the city sink, I watch it drown

As the city sinks under sewer swell

Flooding the streets in traffic-sinking tides

With sewer swell and traffic-sinking tides

Submerging cars under nocturnal tides

Subway cars overcast and cloudburst rides

Sweeping out John Updike and John Irving

Finding their narrative craft unnerving.

A downpouring Batman-like set of wheels

Screeches into the sleek tarmac ideals

Emblazoned on vitreous ersatz reels

Hatched in blase dandyish big-dough deals

A noir-caped brooding male emitting codes

That coruscate on the horizon nodes.

It’s a Machiavellian other,

Perhaps a tarnished and disgraced brother

Stricken from the will, disinherited

As they say, and not very merited.

Eerie bleeps crawl across the radar screen;

A blanching underbelly in one scene

Convulses in Reptilian Fever…

O, world in sinister hold, O, madness…

Like dragon feet, the wheels rub against a

Parking deck in slow deliberate de-

scent, heading for the labyrinthine tunnels.

Who’s that bum on the bench trying to sell

A death-skull ashtray? The capsule grips a

Rumbling silence down the ramp before turn-

ing, then scattering pedestrians, shrieks

High-beamed toward a retaining wall where the

Man crouches, aimed at his solar plexus.

The wheels sear vesicant velocity

Through desiccated leaves, spraying up moss

In oaken wood, seething toward the estate.

A van speeds past, plunging in night’s taper

Unsuspecting, searching for a caper.

Phase III

Breathing, gazing, listening, breathing, o-

ver time, the sounds of the Earth in vitro

And later the sounds of men in the Earth

Gather us into Time, into death’s birth

That we also recall before, recall-

ing relay of reboant cries against wall

and mound of children playing ball through glow

Received, not transmitted, by the window,

Resuscitated captive in the breeze,

Breathing, gazing, listening, breathing, freez-

ing perhaps in the summer heat, supply-

ing the cat with temporary calf by

Which it lingers, itself hobbled, rubbing

All the love it can muster out of it.

The shadows of the window-sliding drops

Are hugely magnified, street-light-skewered

Against the opposing wall, gathering

Terror manufactured in a vial

Blazed corposant at Time’s perilous gates.

Come to me, clutching the new paradigm

Dreamt through a lethal mendicant lie, fall-

ing through a slaughtering sky blown arctic,

Hearts exploded, dying fear-crazed and shocked,

Mummified frozen charred remains, torn and

Shredded, Earth-struck, atomized on impact,

Hypocrite love lost in gentle battle.

Why must the garden always be rotten

With fruit never gotten and forgotten?

In the spring, when roborant poisons rise

And darkened days cling sweetly to demise

Come to me, spent in the sprayed shock of dusk

By flowers rising in their drugging musk

And hot summer orchids’ spiraling swell

Climbing into towering peccant smell

Releasing stench, cloying in their pungence

Oppressive in excessive refulgence

Luxuriating in the outrage of

Sickening revulsion, come to me, love,

Stunned in the ruthless odors of climbers

That feign inverted hours in stopped timers.

When the rains come and the floods draw nigh, come

To me that we may die… that we may die.

The poem, having ended, the conversation again resumes between The Damned Fool, Toma Bed Lamb, and Tamo Shatterd.

“Ingenious,” begins the commentary Bed Lamb. “There is almost no recognizable rhyme scheme, except for the coupleted AA BB variety – to start… and that scheme is broken off and restarted with every other sonnet in the work. However, the couplet-rhymed sonnets break the rhyme pattern precisely where we would expect the final couplet – at the sonnet’s last two lines. Rather, at that point, the sonnet gives way to unrhymed blank verse. This is then followed by a sonnet almost fully in blank verse, which then ends with a rhymed couplet, and then the AA BB rhyme scheme takes up again in the following sonnet. This every-other-sonnet pattern repeats to the end. But this is all generally speaking. For while the author seems intent, indeed, almost desperate, to hold to this chosen pattern, it’s as if the cycle achieves self-consciousness and pits its newly discovered will against the pattern, raging to break out of it and impose its own pattern – upon itself, so to say. The result – we have a poem being barely held together by the creating consciousness, while the consciousness which it has created is hell-bent on driving itself to destruction and breaking apart.”

“Toma – sounds like you’re trying to justify the time you spent on your father’s money getting that so-called degree from The New York Writing School, and where does that get us?”

“I don’t know, Tamo. Maybe you can enlighten us more with that so-called degree you got on YOUR father’s money from The New York Prodigy Institute.”

“That’s The New York Institute of Prodigal Technology to you, Toma!”

“Modern medicine is progressing buoy lapes-en-bowunds,” says The Damned Fool, apropos of nothing.

“In any case,” Bed Lamb continues, “I won’t say I understand it, but I will maintain it’s ingenious. Wallace Wayne, if that’s who the poet is truly writing about, is clearly described in the fifth sonnet; that’s Sonnet No. 5 – smack in the middle of the whole 9-sonnet cycle. Whoever it’s about, he’s at the deepest center of the whole thing. Look at it again; check it out… Here, Fool, give me that book! See, here it is; Phase 2, No. 5:

‘A downpouring Batman-like set of wheels