Protocols 2 by DeYtH Banger (dark academia books to read txt) 📕

Poem #8 - They Feed They Lion

 Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, 
Out of black bean and wet slate bread, 
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, 
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, 
They Lion grow. 

Out of the gray hills 
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, 
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, 
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, 
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, 
They Lion grow. 

Earth is eating trees, fence posts, 
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, 
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, 
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, 
From the furred ear and the full jowl come 
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose 
They Lion grow. 

From the sweet glues of the trotters 
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower 
Of the hams the thorax of caves, 
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up," 
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels, 
The grained arm that pulls the hands, 
They Lion grow. 

From my five arms and all my hands, 
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed, 
From my car passing under the stars, 
They Lion, from my children inherit, 
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion, 
From they sack and they belly opened 
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth 
They feed they Lion and he comes.

by Philip Levine

Poem #9 - Animals Are Passing From Our Lives

 It's wonderful how I jog 
on four honed-down ivory toes 
my massive buttocks slipping 
like oiled parts with each light step. 

I'm to market. I can smell 
the sour, grooved block, I can smell 
the blade that opens the hole 
and the pudgy white fingers 

that shake out the intestines 
like a hankie. In my dreams 
the snouts drool on the marble, 
suffering children, suffering flies, 

suffering the consumers 
who won't meet their steady eyes 
for fear they could see. The boy 
who drives me along believes 

that any moment I'll fall 
on my side and drum my toes 
like a typewriter or squeal 
and shit like a new housewife 

discovering television, 
or that I'll turn like a beast 
cleverly to hook his teeth 
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

by Philip Levine

Poem #10 - During The War

 When my brother came home from war 
he carried his left arm in a black sling 
but assured us most of it was still there. 
Spring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out. 

I stood in a long line waiting for bread. 
The woman behind me said it was shameless, 
someone as strong as I still home, still intact 
while her Michael was burning to death. 

Yes, she could feel the fire, could smell 
his pain all the way from Tarawa– 
or was it Midway?–and he so young, 
younger than I, who was only fourteen, 

taller, more handsome in his white uniform 
turning slowly gray the way unprimed wood 
grays slowly in the grate when the flames 
sputter and die. “I think I’m going mad,” 

she said when I turned to face her. She placed 
both hands on my shoulders, kissed each eyelid, 
hugged me to her breasts and whispered wetly 
in my bad ear words I’d never heard before. 

When I got home my brother ate the bread 
carefully one slice at a time until 
nothing was left but a blank plate. “Did you see her,” 
he asked, “the woman in hell, Michael’s wife?” 

That afternoon I walked the crowded streets 
looking for something I couldn’t name, 
something familiar, a face or a voice or less, 
but not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.

by Philip Levine

Poem #11 - What Work Is

 We stand in the rain in a long line 
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. 
You know what work is—if you're 
old enough to read this you know what 
work is, although you may not do it. 
Forget you. This is about waiting, 
shifting from one foot to another. 
Feeling the light rain falling like mist 
into your hair, blurring your vision 
until you think you see your own brother 
ahead of you, maybe ten places. 
You rub your glasses with your fingers, 
and of course it's someone else's brother, 
narrower across the shoulders than 
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin 
that does not hide the stubbornness, 
the sad refusal to give in to 
rain, to the hours wasted waiting, 
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead 
a man is waiting who will say, 'No, 
we're not hiring today,' for any 
reason he wants. You love your brother, 
now suddenly you can hardly stand 
the love flooding you for your brother, 
who's not beside you or behind or 
ahead because he's home trying to 
sleep off a miserable night shift 
at Cadillac so he can get up 
before noon to study his German. 
Works eight hours a night so he can sing 
Wagner, the opera you hate most, 
the worst music ever invented. 
How long has it been since you told him 
you loved him, held his wide shoulders, 
opened your eyes wide and said those words, 
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never 
done something so simple, so obvious, 
not because you're too young or too dumb, 
not because you're jealous or even mean 
or incapable of crying in 
the presence of another man, no, 
just because you don't know what work is.

by Philip Levine

Poem #12 - On The Meeting Of GarcÍA Lorca And Hart Crane

 Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane's 
been drinking and has no idea who 
this curious Andalusian is, unable 
even to speak the language of poetry. 
The young man who brought them 
together knows both Spanish and English, 
but he has a headache from jumping 
back and forth from one language 
to another. For a moment's relief 
he goes to the window to look 
down on the East River, darkening 
below as the early light comes on. 
Something flashes across his sight, 
a double vision of such horror 
he has to slap both his hands across 
his mouth to keep from screaming. 
Let's not be frivolous, let's 
not pretend the two poets gave 
each other wisdom or love or 
even a good time, let's not 
invent a dialogue of such eloquence 
that even the ants in your own 
house won't forget it. The two 
greatest poetic geniuses alive 
meet, and what happens? A vision 
comes to an ordinary man staring 
at a filthy river. Have you ever 
had a vision? Have you ever shaken 
your head to pieces and jerked back 
at the image of your young son 
falling through open space, not 
from the stern of a ship bound 
from Vera Cruz to New York but from 
the roof of the building he works on? 
Have you risen from bed to pace 
until dawn to beg a merciless God 
to take these pictures away? Oh, yes, 
let's bless the imagination. It gives 
us the myths we live by. Let's bless 
the visionary power of the human— 
the only animal that's got it—, 
bless the exact image of your father 
dead and mine dead, bless the images 
that stalk the corners of our sight 
and will not let go. The young man 
was my cousin, Arthur Lieberman, 
then a language student at Columbia, 
who told me all this before he died 
quietly in his sleep in 1983 
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man, 
Arthur, he survived graduate school, 
later came home to Detroit and sold 
pianos right through the Depression. 
He loaned my brother a used one 
to compose his hideous songs on, 
which Arthur thought were genius. 
What an imagination Arthur had!

by Philip Levine

Poem #13 - Pangur Bàn

 i. 
Jerome has his enormous dozy lion. 
Myself, I have a cat, my Pangur Bàn. 

What did Jerome feed up his lion with? 
Always he's fat and fleecy, always sleeping 

As if after a meal. Perhaps a Christian? 
Perhaps a lamb, or a fish, or a loaf of bread. 

His lion's always smiling, chin on paw, 
What looks like purring rippling his face 

And there on Jerome's escritoire by the quill and ink pot 
The long black thorn he drew from the lion's paw. 

Look, Pangur, at the picture of the lion - 
Not a mouser like you, not lean, not ever 

Chasing a quill as it flutters over parchment 
Leaving its trail that is the word of God. 

Pangur, you are so trim beside the lion. 
- Unlike Jerome in the mouth of his desert cave 

Wrapped in a wardrobe of robes despite the heat, 
I in this Irish winter, Pangur Bàn, 

Am cold, without so much as your pillow case 
Of fur, white, with ginger tips on ears and tail. 

ii. 
My name is neither here nor there, I am employed 
By Colum Cille who will be a saint 

Because of me and how I have set down 
The word of God. He pays.