Miseducation
By Lanny Jordan Jackson
I.
Printing puts an
end to book-
selling: the end
of the world is
coming
Doomed to drain
itself as if by
mechanical habit
in the gallery, a
caterpillar upon
a gold person
The last ladder
on stage is falling,
the dress is cursed,
the marble table is
only used in the orgy
scene
An intensity of ugly
grins: his Cyclops
philosophy is only
worth six months’
rent, O Happy Painter:
every stroke falls as
a black mass
Becoming pubic
The angel of the public:
large black eyes
mouth wide open
but
No voice
No roses in rose-trees
makes you misanthropic,
having never found
love, having no rose,
no aureole of words, no
crickets from Hell
And it disposes you not
to know where to go
to bed, playing kitten
in the street, ancient
light dark light coins
fixed in your fingers
dragging your
crutches on the virgin
fragments of grass,
that is to say:
You understand no
language but that
of a pair of
legs
II.
Poor monk:
there is nothing
But the tides themselves
are highly satisfied to
have stayed by the moon
where there is something
It might be that the
sort of sea it is in
could also
be in something
I often wish to paint
a fat contented
earth: looking nowhere
beyond
And in this case I
do nothing in the world
either, not one thing
A little water in my glass
My eye a face
on the side of a
face
You take your sword
and stay in the archives
to re-blossom
I call it solemn:
the shining face of
the point of the sword
You bring it near your
eye, naked after reading
My own eye, in all its weakness
while the moon turns half round
