Mina Loy

Mina LoyMina LoyOstracized as we are with God
The watchers of the civilized wastes
reverse their signals on our track
 
Lepers of the moon
all magically diseased
we come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores
 
unknowing
how perturbing lights
our spirit
on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fools' faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries
 
We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty
 
Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws
 
You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny ---
 
The cuirass of the soul
still shines ---
And we are unaware
if you confuse
such brief
corrosion with possession
 
In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewellery of the Universe
--- the Beautiful ---
 
While to your eyes
A delicate crop
of criminal mystic immortelles
stands to the censor's scythe. 


Poems

Mina Loy

Gertrude Stein

Mina LoyCurie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel"


Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon

"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes----

An Old Woman

The past has come apart
events are vagueing
the future is a seedless pod
the present pain.

Not even pain has that precision
with which it struck youth.

Years like moths
erode internal organs
hanging or falling
in a spoiled closet.

Does you mirror bedevil you?
Or is the impossible
possible to senility?

How could the erstwhile
agile and slim self---
that narrow silhouette---
come to contain
this huge incognito---
this bulbous stranger---
only to be exorcised by death?

Dilation has entirely dominated
your long reality.

Poe

a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights

sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights

where frozen nightingales in ilex aisles
sing burial rites

Moreover, the Moon ---

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.

Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf .

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