Dear Dirty America

DDA

Report to William Blake

March 10
08:18 2012
Blake, I won’t read
your work again
right now—
maybe never, or
maybe some time
when I don’t know
what to do.
I’m busy
consulting
my imagination:
how to redeem
my routines,
resist
the normal attacks
on my splendid
potential,
& make
unprecedented
moves of
mental warfare:
poems, songs,
polemics, talk,
pictures, forms,
acts.
Your London was
a bloody town—
wars of 7, 30,
100 years
against the French, Algonquin, Spaniards,
Turks, Marathas, Afghans.
You went back there to work & burn yourself out
in acid, metal, & ink, & unconsummated scheming.
They wouldn’t buy your epics on London streets.
I doubt they could look right at you.
What you had done was imperfect, too—
too many characters—frantic, reeling—so baroque.
I barely caught your intent, the hope
& strategy in the midst of your fallen giants.
I flashed back then into the rhythms
of my own experience in the mundane shell.
What an advance of thought!
Yet how far from actually swaying the general will,
from ending the continuous, sporadic Armageddon,
the exploitation, fierce competition, suffering, bitter respites,
resignation, & fading without fulfillment of glorious possibilities.
My path is clearer for your strange lights,
resolution clear & bright.
I chew your protein, Blake, & spit out your gristle.
If we, still in the midst of the battle,
can struggle to sufficient wakefulness, & insist—
your moves may yet come to fruition, Blake.
///
Previously published in Sparks of Fire (USA),
As We Are (USA), Poet (India);
also posted online @ StickYourNeckOut (USA)
///

Picture: William Blake’s “Milton”
//
exemplar +/- series
mental warfare series

Eric Chaet, The Turnaround Artist, born Chicago, USA, 1945, raised on rough South Side, pre-computer factory, office, & warehouse jobs. Some teaching, some independent self-taught technical consulting. 1974, Old Buzzard of No-Man’s Land, poems, Toronto, Canada. 1977, Solid and Sound, vinyl LP of songs, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, USA.  Mid-80s to mid-90s, silkscreened, hitchhiked, & stapled 1500 cloth posters to utility poles along American highways.  1990, How To Change the World Forever For Better, brief prose philosophy, Greenleaf, Wisconsin, USA; 2nd edition, 1994.  2001, People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways, mostly narrative prose, De Pere, Wisconsin, USA.  Lives in Wisconsin, industrialized dairy farms & cows, remnant cheese & paper factories & factory hands & outlaw mammals & birds, post-construction boom, reactionary politics & obsolete machinery, a smattering of professionals & millionaires.  Poems published, over 50 years in many USA states, plus Brazil, Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Nepal, India, China, Singapore, Korea, & Taiwan, often in translation.  

Reach him via Contact box at bottom of any page of his website, 100 Peculiarly Useful So-Called Poems, <http://www.ericchaet.wordpress.com>. 

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