I don't know how close I can get to TSE but he certainly was an influence for a number of years; I'll always be a fan.
Preparing for the Journey
Dans le Bar de la Gare
-GENTLEMEN! LAST CALL!
-I'm telling you, the world has become a collation of Grim Images.
-Like the flies, you mean, that slowly cross
Those starved black cheeks in parched Ethiopia?
-Or those cruel hungry eyes under the blood drop flag
Of floating whale factories.
-Their faces are one thing; their compromised cultures
are no better: Think of those thin-blooded natives
who leech off white men in Polynesian hotels-
The squalid glut of Southeast Asian prostitution-
The cancers of the fallow Amazon basin-
All from men who live snug on their home isle.
- And our own table hosts them:
Trump Tower's opulence, built by the meat of Harlem,
Lost Vegas, packaged in gaudy godless plastics,
Houston, swilling in the excrement of consumption…
-GENTLEMEN, CLASS TALL!
-Our culture succombed at last to Orwellian ends:
The disconnectedness of the cubicle-honda-condo life.
-Indeed, they're rotting on Hesse's feuilleton:
The poseurs of the Internet;
The vapid porography of popular entertainment.
-But what of listener-supported radio?
Shakespeare in the Park?
- Jeffers would say "the final bubbles in the congealing morass."
-GENTLEMEN CASTE, LOLL!
-We grow dim… a song! Come, Maréchal!
-"O, to frolic once again
In the fields of Elysium.
Reside an earlier Eden,
Live on nature's nectars, sweet, and
See it shine, l'age d'or,, shine!
It shines so from behind!"
All: -"Wasn't Life more fine
When Rockwell captured us in lines?"
-Enough! We have a train to catch. Good bye, Neville!
-Good bye, Wilhelm. Good bye, all!
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