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...
...Sometimes I forget which side I'm supposed to be on...
...And she's speaking in tongues they never taught her, Then swing low, sweet UFO, for to Carry home the whole sick crew...
...Inside the berserk plastic of that dome, What God-moth stretches mutant wings ? Stoned Rome Twitches in her sleep...
...DOOMSDAY USA Thou has conquered, 0 pale Galilean...
...From some last supper at Ashbury and Haight, An empire's indigestion: chic self-hate...
...Humanitarians, lynching humanity...
...Into candied other-cheek...
...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...
...a swami, Ripping off L. A., goes barmy when his miracle-fakes turn...
...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...
...Where else but L. A. is the world's tomorrow today...
...He recently received the Artists Foundation's poetry award for his new book, Applewood (unpublished), from which "Holy California" is excerpted...
...Float him in flowing gauze, ethereal tailor...
...Nine egos deep, in your own skull is Troy...
...Peter Viereck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his volume of poetry, Terror and Decorum, holds the Kenan Chair at Mount Holyoke College...
...Are you Mithra, Isis, or Jim Jones...
...Switch off the thunder-father...
...But their health-shiny young ones ? Their gutsy barbaric palaver...
...Gabriel, Michael, Trigger the soft-sell milksop cycle...
...And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born...
...Slouch on, rough beast, towards Disneyland to be born...
...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...
...I. SLOUCHING MESSIAHS Surely some revelation is at hand...
...Who hexed the measured music of the Greek show ? Healers, healers, exorcising sanity...
...Convert them...
...Swinburne's version of Emperor Julian's "Vicisti Galilaee," 363 A.D...
...A senior citizen's sun lamp, tanning a cadaver...
...Skeptics?-raw lysol to invalids, sea-rinse to fierce Nations with Attic salt in their tears...
...No, I mean gorgeous crew...
...Classical, no...
...Go ad lib...
...re-immaculate too, but not very...
...For lynch-lib, we've grandstands: Weatherman's or Klansman's...
...on ad-libbing all id-lib libidos...
...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...
...And if in Bambi-land too "rough" a beast won't do, Bleat a namby-pamby lambikin's Book Two...
...Who'll tell (when earth's foundation lurches) These crusading carnivorous sheep That only clowns build wise churches And only clear waters are deep...
...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...
...Luke goes gospeling ESP, EST, and yeast...
...Stop standing on that pin...
...Herod has just sold thalidomide to Mumso...
...The pap of lib- this-' n' -that still flunks its Pap Tests...
...Yeats, "The Second Coming" Or, this time round, is Southern Cal your den...
...Stow God's long beard in mothballs, paint him paler...
...No pestilence, not even progress, bathes in more blood Than Leader-prone Milquetoasts that want to do good...
...WORLD'S END, while...
...Angelic stagehands, on the double-hop...
...But never in pedant-posing-pagan...
...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...
...Like almost some classical chorus of vengeance...
...What's mere 3,000 years of 'restrain thyself credos...
...John goes apocalypsing a flying-saucer Beast...
...Suffer the wee ones in his new boutique...
...Time: now...
...Who said that...
...Is it Carmel, Cal, or Carmel, Palestine too...
...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...
...Greece LIVES...
...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...
...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...
...Nix on chronology when time reels round and round...
...for rainless Deluge, as brainless asSkip the details...
...true...
...Halt, who reels there ? Carmel is spooky ground...
...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...
...II...
...in short, what a grand freak show...
...Salome still bets heads-or-tails (with Baptists...
...the Geigers beep...
...Salvations ? Salivations ? Massage parlors for infirm Nations with machine oil in their sperm...
...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...
...classy Cal, yes...
...Who more than the City of Angels Is ripe for the God-play's...
...Again the asides...
...replay...
...And don't leave out the jetset saints of Sunset Boulevard Who levitate (best-sellerward...
...Centurion Humphrey Bogart, gone solemn about yogurt, Gone soupy about Buddhas, stops whistling at bermudas, Goes squish at core...
...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...
...In smog that once was breeze, your freeways that once were dune Are dacron-threads of an immense cocoon...
...Ah, weren't there days-dancing goats, satyr plays, Nausicaa washing, Aristophanes joshingWhen no ideologue was vogue...
...Cast: late Rome...
...W.B...
...Isn't that how it started with Lucifer too...
...Yes, God's own country...
...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...
...Till all is clean except the reveries...
...change every prop...
...the world has grown grey from thy breath...
...Messiah weather...
...with drive-in dryads endowed by zen tycoons, Sandaled druids hoard body-fluids and get intense about prunes...
...In my father's house are many Mansons - Lazarus now sports a heart-pacer gismo...
...Saviors are Loose,' the centurion wavers: 'Beg pardon, ghostly sir, What's a poor sentry far from home To make of-whom...
...Now almost like Ides Of March in some spoilsport classical play...
...Ancestral voices prophesying Waugh...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
