WASTED WASTELAND

WASTED WASTELAND

not really dedicated to T.S. Eliot



When I opened with my own eyes the box, not Pandora jumped out but Sibyl of Cumae

And when I asked her what the time is, she replied in modern Greek Zeit zum Sterben!





Sooner in foolish April rather than later

One has to read it, feel it

[STREAM OF poetic UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIENCE]

For the erudite hell of it

And come to the belated realisation that

Yes, I studied Tristan and Isolde but, no, not

On the Starnberger See

Having read the after-notes with extreme shame as to

What I should have known from my

Classical education

Hence I said, turn the table, I said with

A bit of sarcasm

And announce my notes before the poem just in case

You are wasted already

On funny Nietzsche and bloody stupid Wagner but wait

There is more, as they say on TV, to sell the vacuum cleaner

With allusions hidden in the dusty blood of ages

Dragged from the pages of a blood-stained Bible

Death to you too, die with broken bones Jesus, blood-less Inferno

Proto-Fascists Dante and Virgil (and not Ovid), haha, give me Catullus instead

Read Lao Tse and the I Ching but not the Tarot cards

And then finally come to London

City of fog and old fogeys and anglophiles like me and you

Now she comes in colours (malheur you never heard the beetles sing)

Your wife, your crazy wife, depressed as the Hades

Fatally attracted to Black Holes

Politically and psychologically unacceptable at 31 of age what shall we do?

Sadly nothing ado, nothing, NOTHING

Walk along the bank and see what’s floating past

The juncture where the Ganges turns into the holy river Thames

Where rats talk about winners and losers and the neither-nors

Enough to drive you mad with gibberish only to emerge as

Tiresias ever so liminal

What’s this obsession with mythology? Is it really illuminating?

Tiresias, beyond man and woman, jenseits von Gut und Böse …

One cannot best a classicist rife with allusions in Latin and Greek

But a hundred years ago everyone did

So now we have to add Sanskrit and modern French/Italian/German/Mandarin

To be truly educated in English and compose mixed metaphors

Like nymphs in the sweet Thames? Come on!

The stanza about what the thunder said is very Zarathustra-like

Quite brilliant really

I don’t mean to parody

To be a poet ain’t easy, especially if you’re American in exile

And London Bridge is falling down around your ears

And life is your literature, life imitating art

I’m just a jealous guy

Alakh! Bam Bam Bholanath! Bom Shiva!