Cancer, or, The Crab

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,

Suffuses the veins of the eyes

Till the retina, mooncoloured,

Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab

Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape

A flat hot boulder it

Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums

Sidles

The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations

Mad and stark naked

Sidles

The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis

Sidles

All three across heaven with a rocking motion.

The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.'

But the calms are rare

The winds baffling but not light

And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club

Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon

All in the pallescent Sargasso weed

And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance

For

What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon?

(Truth like starlight crookedly)

What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'?

And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we.

But there is no snow here, nor lilies.

The night is glutinous

In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps

Smoulder: distant fireback of copse

Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond

The constellations which have stopped working (?)

Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps.

On edge of lawn a glowworm

Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp

Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn

And in the centre the rugate trees

Though seeming as if they go up in smoke

Are held like cardboard where they are.

Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move.

Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother

Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation

(prandial).'

But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother.

Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for

Praxinoê'

But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's

eyelashes.

Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the

value of its beauty.'

Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.'

But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse.

Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.'

Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool."

Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy?

Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college,

Iphogenês saw God and died,

And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian,

With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and

tripthongs,

Choctaw with three different clicks

Each letter is somebody

But the Crab is nobody

Nobody

A ganglion of neurotic imitations

Composed of each letter in turn

Jointed by conflicts he does not want

A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand.

Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit

He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita

A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude

Haunted by phantoms of his female self

Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus:

Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice

Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea

Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca

Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen

This he desires, but despises:

Bhah!

Always sideways, crabs walk.

Either he is not fit for this world

Or this world not fit for him. But which?

After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward?

They lured him with promises,

Now it has all slipped sideways

What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot

If fated to melt again after getting out of it?

The answers are: He is not out of it

Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock

Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth

For chance is not blind but unimpedable

And we call it blind because

Since we frustrate it only by chance

We prefer to shut our own eyes.

The crab however crawls on.

He must therefore be a crab subnormal.

One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men,

Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles

With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one

Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer

And the process is reversed.

In mass production one hand never knows

The evil the other is inspiring it to do

This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe

So worthless, awkward, unintelligible,

The crab crawls on.

He has sufferd because he was ugly

Let him be cruel now that he is attractive

Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self.

We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged

Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods:

We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer

We don't. We drink and drivel. My

poor Catullus, do stop being such a

fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is

gone. O, once the days shone very bright for

you, when where that girl you loved so (as no

other will be) called, you came and came. And

then and there were odd things done and many

which you wanted and she didn't not want.

Yes indeed the days shone very bright for

you. But now she doesn't want it.

Don't you either,

booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in

misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.

Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened,

doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not

keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked.

Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for

you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted?

Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to?

Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble?

—Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened.

How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?

O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn

Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind

Wind humming like distant rooks

Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal

Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth

These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars

Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality

Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization

Civilization being relative our to Greek

Greek to Persian

Persian to Chinese

Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction

Satisfaction a matter of capacity

Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram

Epigrams—poems with a strabismus

Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon

The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the

Zodiac

And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways

Circling from no point returning through no point

Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving,

Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.

Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?

Nothing.

Source: The Ecliptic (Flood Editions, 2016)