Letter: Mrs. Ludd.

poems

by

Fifth Estate # 358, Fall, 2002

 

first

Volunteer to serve the Negation

Never too late for Mrs Ludd

If Bugs Bunny’s a Surrealist

what’s that make Elmer Fudd?

Wherever you are tonight Mrs L

Tiamat Tara river nymph undine

Captain Moonlight & Saint Monday

flaneurs on ancient boulevards of spleen

never complain never explain

our secret society goes back to the Neolithic

peonies penises skinsoft rain

the garden-the bicycle-please be more specific

.

second

Perfect Mirror of Global Capital

the Devil’s waiting room

haunted slum & universal slime

of techGnosis & cybergloom

pumpkinification

carpal brain syndrome

public suicide machine

Mammon’s Dictaphone

Moloch’s internal combustion

psychic noise pollution

landscape of corpselight

metaphoric cold fusion

.

third

Very well no longer resist prophetic voices

angry illiterate letter Pinned to social factory’s door

Neither Physics Nor Metaphysics-empirical morality

haunted by spirits real as need be but poor.

Suburban Luddite. Jungle marches on the city

tear down digital enclosures smash the looms

turn off the hell drone kill the power

light the lying City only with Moon.

.

Fourth

zerowork taoist hermitage

maybe in the Hardenbergh Mts

Catskill romantic arts-&-crafts style

with bunches of twisty branches

jugs of cider marked XX

cellphone towers not yet sprouted

once or twice per day satanic zzmm

of intercontinental jets otherwise silence

thunder wind & birds all silent

rain is a type of silence

dead drunk under the Moon

Luddite Pornography

sunlight or rainlight in the hayloft

privy overgrown with primrose & honeysuckle

up in the cold clouds & dripping pines

no car no phone no plumbing no electricity

nothing to block trembling blue orgone

or stupidity of naked Nature

now pubescent & swollen

.

fifth & last

Reactionary nostalgist

crackpot Kropotkinite

last human lab-rat gone rabid

ungrateful dynamite

.

monasteries of slowness

even light goes less than MC2

cultivate holy datalessness

secrets meant to be shared

.

How many Lady Ludds

how many General Neds

it was raining when you left us

we forgot what you said

THE BLACK LAMP

1.

radical journal connected to the Despard conspiracy &

Luddism early 1800s north of England

.

or: “dark lantern” or glim used by pre-electric burglars

could also refer to oil lamp with glass chimney

unwashed black with carbon or “lampblack” (once used

to make ink)

.

or metaphor: eyes of the beloved color

of madiera in tawny dark bottles down in

the cellar at night by glinting candlelight:

velvety monastery under perverse Moon

.

oxymoron: sun at midnight: night sky with

paradoxical meteors: negative illumination

.

2.

Rolling Blackout

Switch off the Aufklarung before leaving

socialism minus electricity please

Black Light of the alchemists of Isfahan

where even day falls into reveries

Power failure: rain comes in lacquered screens

the house feels like a pelican of glass

phone goes dead but someone else’s voice

starts to life like pistils licked by bees

Storm’s over:

power returns but not to you

tree-hating landscape-rapists throw the switch

electrocuting all your monastic pleasures

icebox grumbles lightbulbs galvanize

radio threatens more cancerous weather

eliminating all your buried treasures

.

3.

Enoch’s Hammer

We lose a world every 15 minutes

by evening nostalgia for morning overtakes us

digital hemlock numbs our limbs to slumber

fearing nothing nice will come to wake us

This IS the Future: how do you like it so far

anachronistic fireflies? Petroleum: a prophecy

(by the author of Der Golem) suffocation

600 channels: tombstones: burning seas

Black Lamp dark phosphorescence pearl of night

how many dodo species whacked like weeds

or children vanished into ambient screens

No King But King Ludd asleep beneath the hill

under the parking lot the beach-but who

could be foolish enough to want to smash machines?

.

note

last known sledgehammer of the Luddites

manufactured by Enoch & Co

I see it under glass in the museum

one night begin to glow

ET IN ARCADIA. (for Bishop Mark Sullivan)

“The human desire for transcendence is an arguably hard-wired behaviour”

—Arcadia Research Project

Australian Network for Art & Technology

.

1.

Gnostic police-mind over matter-

what else is law but magic?

a fictitious person has no liabilities—

only assets

no corpse to weigh down its

immortal spirit

Sphinx

vast & vague as a cloud of radioactivity

succubus

flea that swells to the size of a galaxy

“discorporation” might be a more accurate term

or something retro like “Sathanas”

.

Cell phone towers hide inside steeples

where does bad religion go when it dies?

.

El Estupido the unconscious thinks it’s all SciFi

strawberries crossed with the genes of fat people

.

2.

High Moral Ground? Y’can’t get there from here

pervert pleasure: class traitor (see Genet)

voluptuous degringolade-Imaginal Past

down the hole with the trolls: gone away

.

Exiles of Cyberia Unite

nothing to lose but chains of Lite.

.

3.

The old Ukrainian carp fishers

are picking up & moving

slowly out of this dutch genre

June & dappled—even the name is dutch

Wallkill.

.

From the other bank

you can see they scored at least

one big one

dull gold held up in the ray between

blue clouds

steamed with dill & potatos

.

4.

renunciation laves the skin like rain

silky spagyric excised from time but not

from space BLAMM thunder defines space

a game of bowls in a valley time forgot

Not that you have anything against time

as continuum rather than torture machine

or the Taylorism of everyday life sliced

& diced & lost to some Maxwellian fiend

In fact the Order proposes a reconquista

seizing back the provinces of rain—

invisible worlds hover behind its screens

Every gadget that disappears makes way for

unpolluted space/time to reclaim

the marches between the banal & the unseen

.

5.

Anabaptists on dope: strict observance

Amish icebox spermaceti lamps

under the radar off the grid—in fact

no phone no television & no amps

Entheogenic sacramental heaven

whiling away the time till Armageddon

.

6.

haven’t tied off the veins of pleasure but

just can’t stand the tragedy of representation

.

dunno much theology biology but

shade is as good as a hat

.

Le Physiognomie du gout delivers the goods but

the Slow Food Movement’s an Escargo Cult

.

the best parts could be buried in a box but

their aura would heal sterile soil

.

don’t want to flee the country again but

might have to

.

7.

E T A Hoffmann Fan Club

Pro-Endarkenment Left

meet at the bend in the river

between warp & weft

.

Children on summer lawns

birds at their dawning jamming

nightingales sullen thunder

hunting & farming

.

Fishing the manuscriptorium

the stylite in an armchair

stuck in the crook of a willow

prays to empty air

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