Holy California: Cocoons for What?
Viereck, Peter
Peter Viereck HOLY CALIFORNIA: COCOONS FOR WHAT? AUTHOR'S NOTE: "Slouching Messiahs" and "Doomsday USA" are spoken by Los Angeles angels with trumpets, in the city best symbolizing the...
...Go ad lib...
...He recently received the Artists Foundation's poetry award for his new book, Applewood (unpublished), from which "Holy California" is excerpted...
...Isn't that how it started with Lucifer too...
...A senior citizen's sun lamp, tanning a cadaver...
...No pestilence, not even progress, bathes in more blood Than Leader-prone Milquetoasts that want to do good...
...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born...
...the Geigers beep...
...Classical, no...
...Swinburne's version of Emperor Julian's "Vicisti Galilaee," 363 A.D...
...Peter Viereck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his volume of poetry, Terror and Decorum, holds the Kenan Chair at Mount Holyoke College...
...Where else but L. A. is the world's tomorrow today...
...for rainless Deluge, as brainless asSkip the details...
...In smog that once was breeze, your freeways that once were dune Are dacron-threads of an immense cocoon...
...Stop standing on that pin...
...Are you Mithra, Isis, or Jim Jones...
...Paving the road to hell with good inventions, No tech, no ec can save their neck When an anti-Christ Christ has exorcised Rooted norm, living form, smiling arete...
...From some last supper at Ashbury and Haight, An empire's indigestion: chic self-hate...
...Inside the berserk plastic of that dome, What God-moth stretches mutant wings ? Stoned Rome Twitches in her sleep...
...Nine egos deep, in your own skull is Troy...
...WORLD'S END, while...
...on ad-libbing all id-lib libidos...
...The brief interruptions in "Slouching Messiahs" (set off by quotes and indented margins) are by a mystery voice-is it a ghost or is it more alive than the living?-representing one kind of conservative classical humanism...
...Herod has just sold thalidomide to Mumso...
...classy Cal, yes...
...Yeats, "The Second Coming" Or, this time round, is Southern Cal your den...
...II...
...The pap of lib- this-' n' -that still flunks its Pap Tests...
...And here they come, Schlemiels in sackcloth, carting back with love The GORGEOUS MUSH Greek strictness gypped us of:The juicy hogwash-truths of don't- think-but-feel, The slick sincerities of confessional swill, The western Deep Thinker in mystic-east drag, The Abominable Showman of spiritual brag, Magdalens brandishing (0 miracle) a born-again cherry, Watergate breast-beaters...
...Three bumbling kinglets straight from Ruritania, Confusing stars of sky and of big brass, End up in Bethlehem Steelworks, Pennsylvania, And strew God's myrrh on napalm, bomb, and gas...
...Centurion Humphrey Bogart, gone solemn about yogurt, Gone soupy about Buddhas, stops whistling at bermudas, Goes squish at core...
...Suffer the wee ones in his new boutique...
...Angelic stagehands, on the double-hop...
...Ah, weren't there days-dancing goats, satyr plays, Nausicaa washing, Aristophanes joshingWhen no ideologue was vogue...
...Gabriel, Michael, Trigger the soft-sell milksop cycle...
...Who hexed the measured music of the Greek show ? Healers, healers, exorcising sanity...
...Who said that...
...true...
...the world has grown grey from thy breath...
...At once from the woodwork of two thousand years Each soulful creep-I mean hero-appears: The moral jocks of the soul-wrestler gyms, The soapbox's stylites (hoarse isms their hymns), Ascetics in hairshirts (lined with mink), Hemophiliacs of the heart (bleeding only red ink), Samaritans of tax- deducted pews, Handwashing judges, anti-Semite Jews, And with-it clerics praised for their broad views...
...Salome still bets heads-or-tails (with Baptists...
...Again the asides...
...with drive-in dryads endowed by zen tycoons, Sandaled druids hoard body-fluids and get intense about prunes...
...His other books include The Unadjusted Man, Conservatism Revisited, Meta-Politics: Roots of the Nazi Mind, and Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill: An Anthology...
...Luke goes gospeling ESP, EST, and yeast...
...Into candied other-cheek...
...change every prop...
...Switch off the thunder-father...
...Slouch on, rough beast, towards Disneyland to be born...
...Here 2 plus 2 are An upwardly mobile 5, not a Squaresville 4. Tone-deaf, we've missed (where's the sat-i-rist, to flay a parvenu flaw...
...Thou hast conquered, O tanned Californian: mens insana, in corpore sano: That hygienic body you're born in, will blow their mind just like Drano...
...Salvations ? Salivations ? Massage parlors for infirm Nations with machine oil in their sperm...
...a swami, Ripping off L. A., goes barmy when his miracle-fakes turn...
...For lynch-lib, we've grandstands: Weatherman's or Klansman's...
...John goes apocalypsing a flying-saucer Beast...
...But their health-shiny young ones ? Their gutsy barbaric palaver...
...And she's speaking in tongues they never taught her, Then swing low, sweet UFO, for to Carry home the whole sick crew...
...And godliest its lab tests: From a shaky Assumption to a test-tube Conception of Stainless Steel Yes, perfect climate for painless Doomsday, as folksy as tag sales...
...Saviors are Loose,' the centurion wavers: 'Beg pardon, ghostly sir, What's a poor sentry far from home To make of-whom...
...Greece LIVES...
...Halt, who reels there ? Carmel is spooky ground...
...I. SLOUCHING MESSIAHS Surely some revelation is at hand...
...Who more than the City of Angels Is ripe for the God-play's...
...W.B...
...What's mere 3,000 years of 'restrain thyself credos...
...But never in pedant-posing-pagan...
...Ancestral voices prophesying Waugh...
...Is it Carmel, Cal, or Carmel, Palestine too...
...Shacking up with nothing warmer than a name-"mankind, Feeling yummy guilt for not being lame-or halt or blind, Watching the green go brown (where they say Pan left town), He joins the Forum sit-in for pulling out of Britain, And from sado-masoch sex at the Nero circus-max He'll hot-rod to-which God...
...DOOMSDAY USA Thou has conquered, 0 pale Galilean...
...AUTHOR'S NOTE: "Slouching Messiahs" and "Doomsday USA" are spoken by Los Angeles angels with trumpets, in the city best symbolizing the irresistible march of progress...
...Humanitarians, lynching humanity...
...Nix on chronology when time reels round and round...
...Messiah weather...
...Who'll tell (when earth's foundation lurches) These crusading carnivorous sheep That only clowns build wise churches And only clear waters are deep...
...Cast: late Rome...
...No, I mean gorgeous crew...
...Skeptics?-raw lysol to invalids, sea-rinse to fierce Nations with Attic salt in their tears...
...in short, what a grand freak show...
...And if in Bambi-land too "rough" a beast won't do, Bleat a namby-pamby lambikin's Book Two...
...Yes, God's own country...
...In my father's house are many Mansons - Lazarus now sports a heart-pacer gismo...
...Till all is clean except the reveries...
...Now almost like Ides Of March in some spoilsport classical play...
...When an acidhead sibyl, walking on waterBeds at her Manson Son-of-Man altar, Is hearing the sky-Lord she shouldn't oughter (Or is it the land-lord rapping for order...
...Sometimes I forget which side I'm supposed to be on...
...replay...
...Time: now...
...And don't leave out the jetset saints of Sunset Boulevard Who levitate (best-sellerward...
...Float him in flowing gauze, ethereal tailor...
...Convert them...
...What's one more God, way out here beyond Rome 's limes ? I fear I'm going native.' -Instead of aiming spear Or laser and shouting, 'DANGER...
...Stow God's long beard in mothballs, paint him paler...
...re-immaculate too, but not very...
...Like almost some classical chorus of vengeance...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
