in the physics of Immortality:
each minuteman shopping from his home:
"Eternal must that progress be.":

Channel surfing on the Biblia Vulgari:
freedom of choice between the social Darwinism of ichthyology:
or the physical science of corporate theocracy:

***deleted***

And before us a demon
with a cattle prod
tenderized a soul:

who from pole to pole
in this burlesque bobbed
to avoid our gaze:

annoyed I said: "I was not
spared the sight or sound of you before.
You who cast your eyes upon the ground.

If your features are not false,
you gotta be Sir Karl Popper:
Ma che ti mena a si pungenti salse?":

Then he to me: "Shut the fuck up!
For here I'm compelled to answer
questions no matter how base the source:

I'm not the only Nobel wannabe consigned to this pool:
like eels heaped in a bin, this place
is so crammed full of us:

that not so many scientists and sycophants have learned to sing
patrone between the London School and Lawrence Livermore:
and that reminds me: salutations to my comrade Teller:

he has a sadistic streak in him
that shines like a shrimp's colon.":
and Popper began to submerge into the sulfurous pitch:

"Wait:" cried my companion: and Virgil smiled at me
and said: "Let's not leave Sir Karl for dead.
Sir knight, expound a little for my boy:

'Give us a contemporary example of an uncritical
philosophical creed that's in need of critical examination.'"
Popper rose to the bait:

"A very influential philosophy of the kind
I have in mind is the view that when something
bad happens in society, something we dislike,

such as war, poverty, unemployment, then
it must be the result of some bad intention,
some sinister design: somebody has done it 'on purpose;'

and, of course, somebody profits from it."
"You mean," sniggered Virgil, "In criminal activity
some discern crime." "Yes," proffered Popper,

"I have called this philosophical assumption
the conspiracy theory of society." Virgil beamed:
"Did you intend that your philosophy

be an absolution? Your peroration is news
to the souls that call themselves I don't know.":
and the demon, who like all the devil's wards possessed

little appreciation for a knight's metaphysics,
moved to deflate the shit-crusted Sir Karl
with a halberd trimmed from an old flag pole

that whipped its channels of blood and innocence
above Fort Bragg and the School of the Americas:
But Virgil reached out and stayed the blow:

"No! Sir Karl Popper, you were nothing but a cruel
yet carnal joke: a violent aside set upon the earth."
And at this acknowledgment, Sir Karl lifted

from the filth revealing a mass many times what his pate
would indicate: and rolling in the cess
like a walrus in the surf aimed his rump at my guide:

a great expanse cleft pole to pole:
with human features and an eager tongue
in the hole which mouthed: "The conscious manipulation

of the organized habits of the masses
is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism

of society constitute an invisible government
which is the true ruling power in our country."
Virgil guffawed: "See, Popper shares a soul with Edward Bernays."

And before my laughing eyes,
what was ass became head
and what was crown became hole.

***deleted***

Gauss said, "Thou, nature, are my goddess..."
He too reached to unlace her bodice:
and it was his furtive promises, not nature, that proved immodest:

and to this day Herr Gauss kann die Aufgabe nicht herausbekommen:
at this, the harpy hissed and shat upon my head:
I fled, blinded, by the acid in my eyes

until what seemed the uroboros lassoed my thighs:
but when I turned to oppose the great constrictor:
I realized that Virgil was my interdictor:

and we lay prone, half suspended over a bluff:
overlooking a supine dome gilt with gleaming alloy:
which bore a dark hole at its core:

and on its slope flashing teeth set like the combs on a loom:
turned to deny both entry and flight:
and we lay on our bellies at pit's edge:

cinders rasping down the burnished wall:
and wiping the demiurge's guano from my eyes,
"A buried shield! "I gasped,

"with a history of the world chased into its chalice.
And is that Byzantine Philo there in the silo?":
"No," answered my guide, "for all his engines of war,

Philo had not the malice to be cast in this bore:
this ditch was dug in 1945: using the most
elementary picks then known to god and man":

and fanning like the flourescent wand across a radar screen,
Virgil illumined a field of nuclear vents:
repeating to the horizon clones of the mammoth sink on whose brink we now sat:

here hell resembled the rind of a colossal golf ball:
Shit! the wondrousness of it: the industry: the discerning paranoia:
that resounded in the macabre iterativeness of these lethal pits:

And Virgil spoke: "Each emblazoned shaft in its concrete moorings,
the metal silo, and all its electronic components,
are incarnate of the soul cocked therein."

"It's too bad," I said, "That the damned are so cocooned:
they offer no shape by which those with meat might communicate."
But Virgil replied, "Say what's on your mind

and they will retaliate: in death as in life,
it's the shadow's stamina that summons
the anima: but let me warn you:

don't expect the truth from the straightshooters confined below."
And directly I hailed the epicenter of our silo:
"Who haunts this hole: this dog dish perigee?"

"This is General Curtis LeMay, and you better salute,
you worthless little come rag: and call me 'Sir,'"
came the reply straight away: "Hey, Virge, what fairy haired,

shit fuck poet have you brought here to bugger now?
if he knows a little Defcon tune maybe he and I will sing a dirge:
Son, there's more to prophecy in hell than 800 numbers:

and since stirring me could be your behind:
you would do well to take note of mine:
I got one word for you, kid: First-strike capability.

Topside, I was terrified of myself: I mean my urges:
nothing demi about 'em: my rag went from sticky to stiff to sticky again:
and, of course, in harmony with western religion, science and epistemology:

in my mind I was the unit of measure for all mankind:
the great chain, social Darwinism, anthropic principle: all the horseshit
that constrains the West, twice-condemned, to evangelize its abuse:

and the military is where this Narcissism is most vigorously borne.
So I onanized my terror: the quantified enemy: Ivan: you: the gooks:
in the Situation Room billions were launched against the ovum of my desires:

Joe McCarthy got the skin of it right: `The enemy within:'
and in the cavity the willies fructified:
and you, shit-for-brains, do the same. The difference is:

your personal mythology is a pathetic phallacy of the sword:
while my public swordplay is adored.
Yet for me that's little consolation:

perhaps it was the glimpses of humanity at pre-induction physicals:
because war is a slaughterhouse:
and a good butcher should be able to sell any cut of meat.

But before I could hit the Reds with all we had, I died:
mere death had interrupted my teleology:
maybe I didn't loathe myself enough?:

Armegeddon as psychoanalytic poker bluff:
or maybe in the competing self-interests,
I too got quantified: took my eye off the money:

and by virtue of my commodification, I became a target:
with a choice between advertising and annihilation:
and, finally, forced to take my chances in hell:

Is this too abstruse for you, limp dick?
Ain't you ever heard of Hollywood?
Here, let me show you what I mean:"

and the shade of Curtis LeMay propulsed a little from his hole:
looking exactly as the actor did in his bio-pic:
Raconteur of Doomsday: "Come closer, kid:

I want to show you my dais nous monde":
and as I leaned closer Virgil tugged and said, "Don't be gulled."
At which the general's cap popped off

to expose the glower of General Thomas Power:
locked and armed in his commanding officer's war head:
LeMay cackled, "Have you seen my Charlie McCarthy, boy?

Get 'im, Tommy: Get the little bastard: Deploy! Deploy!":
and with this Tommy launched:
overshooting us into some unknown region of Dis:

and from every other pit a missile bodied forth:
"Duck and cover! Duck and cover!" I cried;
but it was as though the cord to my throat had fallen from its socket

in the concussive swell of a nuclear exchange in hell:
and from the melee, the atomized souls resurrected themselves
through the calculus of the reprisal of parts.

And Virgil shook his head like one resigned to such senselessness
and said: "These who would gladly forsake the human race
find their charity in this place":

And I, brushing brimstone from my breast:
"Isn't this supposed to be hell where their souls are vexed?"
And Virgil, "These can't be touched;

and trust me, the Numen has tried his best."
"His best! LeMay still can't experience simple sex
without game theory, systems analysis and

death @ 2 cents a head: and always somebody else's at that."
I sneered and walked a little way to regroup,
when in the dust I booted LeMay's incarnated head:

it grinned and an arm some distance away crawled up to it;
and the two fragments merged in a brisk salute:

***deleted***

the yard was guarded by Harvard MBA's:
and one day mine, reading from his manual of market democracy,
read: "A political prisoner is defined as one

who resists quantification." And then he ran his truncheon
along the bars which were light beams with an algorithmic pulse:
that is, in strict correspondence to the laws of nature,

as narrated by one of nature's creatures:
compelling a high degree of coherence
by making the atoms emit light in phase.

and the guard bounced my face off luminous shafts
as beautiful as any sunburst through the trees:
only these fused an eye, a nostril, the left side of my jaw:

and on my knees, feeling the concrete for my teeth:
"Yes, we're all binary, binary by corporate fiat:"
villains and heroes:

metabolized into ones and zeros:
so that Odysseus can lay down with Newall and Simon:
and interface to determine which, for the moment, will have the hymen:

or perhaps take a herz or two to remember:
John Von Neumann had no sensation in his 'rigid member:'
or that the organ of communication

is a boggy amplifier of sensation:
meitosis by accumulation:
matter becomes ethereal: and the contradiction, immaterial.

"Nothin' personal," crooned the guard:
"History is a nightmare
from which I'm trying to make a buck:

but to show you that I represent capitalism with a human face:
while your wounds fester and infection sets in:
and your face hardens into its fractured yaw:

I'll tell you a story that according to the for-profit penal codes
absolves me and my employers of any legal responsibility
for your injuries or death while hosteled here:

not to mention any transgression that involves advanced technologies
whose specific defects were not anticipated in the constitution
or predicted in the Bible: or blaspheme those scientists:

who by malice or methodical restraint would:
pointing heavenward: hasten HIS arrival:
Well; enough about your rights:

think of me as one of Chaucer's pilgrims:
or Boccaccio's quarantines who
for prologue crushed your spleen:

I'm sure you remember Karl Krauss's maxim:
'Science is spectrum analysis:
art is photosynthesis.' Well,

it seems that the great coloraturas, Goethe and Newton,
had taken their differences on the road:
in a series of debates from London to Leipzig:

and after a rancorous exchange in Berlin:
where Goethe conceded that nothing in Zur Farbenlehre
was beyond the scope of Newton's theory:

they took a room for the night at the Holiday Inn:
after a meal in the bar and a good cigar:
weary, the poet and the natural philosopher retired.

And as Herr Goethe has reported:
"A well-favoured girl with a brilliantly fair complexion,
black hair, and a scarlet bodice, came into [his] room."

The poet, overcome by her face and form in the dim light, stared
and when the girl turned away she left on his eye her impression,
a silhouette bathed in a sea green dress:

pre-Raphaelite in negative:
and when the same chambermaid offered Sir Isaac a fresh towel:
ruminating, he stroked his jowls and commended

both their souls to God:
and when she turned away
only bars of light remained anchored in the grey.

Later, Goethe dreamt that the girl again entered his room
tucked only in the towel:
and the towel was transformed, sewn in strips of different hues:

yellows, reds, greens, blues: the poet stared
and smoothed his hair: as any man
nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita might do:

and as she hovered over his bed she let the makeshift lingerie fall:
but in that instant the poet realized that it was
Sir Isaac Newton's shape under the towel

wearing the girl's skin like butcher's offal:
and between his legs burst forth a prism
that sprayed a rainbow of gysm across the room.

Next morning over juice, a rested Newton
asked Goethe how he had slept: the poet
looked up from his eggs, unfertilized,

and examined the confident, inquiring eyes
of science, and wept.