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SONGS OF FUTURE EGYPT by Simon Drax

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I wish this were a mirage

woven for our cameras.

But I saw it. I was there.

The old woman blew in from the desert

like a broken-winged bird,

she planted her feet in the Valley of Kings

and managed the levitation of the pyramids,

coaxed them by the power of her voice

to rotate slowly in the noonday sun.

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She appeared nightly on the news

to give vent to her demands.

Her eyes smoldered sightlessly

in the wizened folds of her sockets

as she bent toward the camera

and spat words in a soft spray of sand.

At the bottom of our screens the translation:

Egypt has risen.

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Behind her stand legions

fierce with the emblem of

the Sphinx on their crisp

new uniforms of brown and gold and white,

faces scraped and shining with saliva

drawn from their once slack lips. They wait

for the word

to strike their camp of diesel and dust,

to throw open the tombs and crack wide the planet.

Their necrotic majesty’s face fills the screen:

This is the war you always dreaded.

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Now days of war and waste

are all we have,

black needles from the sky

and venomous shrieks of victory

from the withered lips of a

4,000 year old madwoman.

Not mad, she hisses from her

crooked hook of a throne. Furious.

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She is everywhere, now.

She no longer needs

screens, speakers, translations.

She watches from above,

her empire reclaimed,

a planet conquered

beneath her heel

and she whispers

All will be well

in the coming

fall of my cloak,

be well, be well,

beware.

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Boston, 1988 + Bethel 2009 + Now February 11, 2011

© Simon Drax

Graphics: Soldier and Pyramid—Getty. Woman—Uncredited via tumblr

Ω

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Imagine for a moment we were never born…

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never carved from the misplaced passion of our parents,

never carried from room to room and gently told

this is that and that is this,

never set down to dry  in the sun

after splashing all afternoon in our rubber pool

and dream of driving the car we will never drive,

the hair we will never shave,

the places we will never go,

the thrills we can’t even imagine.

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We would have never seen the newsreels

of how they raised the warships from the ice,

those armored giants with hearts of steel and steam

resurrected for some crazy purpose

that made men weep and women scowl.

Your Grandfather’s voice always shook as he told me

how the polar night had been

shattered by the sound of trumpets

when the first of the destroyers broke the surface.

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You won’t remember this

but the ships had names like

Orpheus, Akira, Memory Waltz, and Avenger of Death,

names spun like laughter at a funeral

or songs ringing from the radio.

The flowers were cast to the water

and the ships slipped forward,

cutting through lines of latitude

as dull grey knives

through memory, through history, the past,

aimed at an alien shore unseen.

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Oh careful

that moment

when scarlet bursts

bloomed against the ashen sky,

when the shape of the land met

with the arms of the ocean and became one,

friend and enemy, lover and destroyer,

steel and cannon and slag and smoke,

the same moment your seed took root

and started to become

you…

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In the white and blue room

the doctors all grinned

as they pulled you free.

I remember the future, I predict, I see:

the pink wet gloves,

the sweat stained shirts.

I remember, I know:

the faces split by smiles

as they held you high

as your lungs drew their first breath

as the radio crackled with news

of victory at sea, so far away,

so far from home.

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Happy Birthday, Little Man.

Ω

Poem © Simon Drax

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There is no poetry and

there are no words—

Only the ocean

Endless, this desperation

The agony of each stroke

Endless, this ache

This long swim

Through the zero lunar night.

Ω

(Pronounced “Finished/Abandoned” on 12/9/10)

Ghib10

Undercurrent, Windy & Carl

Your favorite obsession—
zero moon and black sun beams,
rays of rage n hate and oh so melancholy
memories of tomorrow, regret prepackaged…

(just the way you like it)

Bad music and karma collapse.
Come on in, get it now,
because this shit can’t last, babe,
this shit can’t last—
Black opulence has no choice.
Come on in, get it now,
before glorious black mellows
to mere dust and shitty grey.

Ω

© Drax (yeah yeah…)

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[and it's really, like, an amazing poem]

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Ω

Takato Yamamoto

David Galas, “Last Days of the War”

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WINTERBLACK III © Chad Michael Ward

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THAT’S IT, done, finito. Above, the full art used for the Venus banner, uncropped. I would dearly love to know the artist’s name; if anyone recognizes the work, please drop me a line. (UPDATED: Thank you, Mlle Ghoul!) Also, there are no accompanying credits for the “faux tumbl,” below. Apologies. Some of those images have been kicking around for eons, since… oh my Christ… since my Apple IIe, holy CHRIST, I’m old!! Anyway, the images below were used on my “About” page on the now officially defunct Fires of Venus, and I’m going to run them without text. No funny captions. My origin in pictures, no words. Deep.

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Ω

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for Alexandra Bradley

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Impervious! She goes!

The wheels spin, she rides!

Like beloved music

Played for a solid afternoon

She cannot be slowed,

She cannot be stopped!

Her face covers the walls

of a thousand hearts.

She’s cycling to Africa

to save the elephants.

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For the greater good of God

For the smile from a friend

For the smallest shard of

Hope from the radio,

She’s cycling to Africa

to save the elephants.

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“But why?” her friends

And family say,

“You can’t! You can’t!

There’s an ocean in the way!”

But she’s going just the same,

She’s cycling to Africa

to save the elephants.

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She dreams

Of long yellow paths

Packed hard under

The dance of the pachyderms,

She dreams of memory everlasting

And a land of fertile fields

Where the elephants graze and wait,

They wait for the Shooting Star’s debut

In their faraway land, for she will explain…

She will explain everything.

They wait.

She will come.

She’s cycling to Africa

to save the elephants.

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Very nice! But I must say it seems so oddly cheerful for you. — Brigindo

Yeah, well. It can’t always be apocalypse all the time. — Drax

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Saved the best for last.

THIS IS THE LAST OF THE VENUS POEMS I’ll be “reprinting” here. (There’s actually one more—Pyromantic—but even though it has a highly exciting groovy image of a burning woman, the poem itself is a major goof: “Kiss me kiss me YOU FOOL oh kiss me, give me your kisses of fire,” etc, so I think we can all live without seeing it a second time…)

There is, however, one last bit that I’ll be running from the Venus site: not a poem, but the Draxian bio, the “About” page. It’ll play like another faux tumblr post. It’s fairly amusing. Coming soon.

Ω

]]> http://simondrax.com/2010/03/15/cycling-to-africa-to-save-the-elephants/feed/ 4 simondrax VENUS_presents_Cycling http://simondrax.com/2010/03/12/lament-of-the-corpse-on-his-cross/ http://simondrax.com/2010/03/12/lament-of-the-corpse-on-his-cross/#comments Sat, 13 Mar 2010 04:17:50 +0000 Drax http://simondrax.com/?p=2424 ]]>

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Oh Father,

grant me sight,

my eyes are imperfect,

they insist on crying

every night

I dream of you

as I wander through

this cathedral of steel

and floor of crushed skulls,

my legs splinter, I kneel,

my mouth shaping songs old

with all words forgotten,

I count every breath,

I wait for your wail

to split the sky,

to fall on me and

color the dawn white,

paler than the blood of saints

who gather about and weep

as they drink deep, licking

the gashes slashed across

my wrists, the saints blind,

the saints lost…

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Oh Father I sicken of your silence.

Deliver me from this bloodless host.

My cross is made but of wood.

Your house is empty.

I am less than a ghost.

Ω

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Once in line at the supermarket I saw a boy barely taller than a toddler with three large growths on his head, three pink bubbles boiling from his brain, as if a needle had been slipped between skin and skull and pumped air into his flesh. A single prick and his face would explode.

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I thought of you as I watched him eat a candy bar, watched him smear mud and drool across his lips, watched his eyes fly open with desire, point to a Tonka Toy and babble at his father. The father flinched in his slow moving dream of brown paper bags and woke to the ring ding bright light thank you have a nice day of the check-out line. The father’s mouth popped open, as if he had never seen any of it ever before.

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Amazing, how the food just kept coming down those cracked black belts.

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The father asked the boy what he wanted. The boy pointed to the Tonka. The father shook his head No.

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I thought of you. The smell of your hair, the scar on your leg, how you ground your teeth when you slept in my bed, how you pinched your face and listened patiently to my hum-drum-doo-dah-I-love-you life stories.

Ω