The Love of Scarlet Phantoms

(for Cathy Porter)


Unwanted
In dream & awakening alone
No solitudinal silence
Tinnitus bi-laterally
Whispering in the worst ear
To leave to leave
Hostility from
My own body
Audie
Murphy
Marine ball, Jane,
Blond & muscular in high heels
We're on board.

& after March 1918?
after the 7th Congress -
or was it before that
it began to fall apart, her
"Doing God's business with the Monks"
or even Lenin's desire for the Absolute
manifested in dictatorship despite
MacDiarmid's
"The cheka's horrors are in their degree"

To hell with Lenin, then, Hugh.
What did he bring but Stalin in his wake.
Yet, to use this against you
As Seamus Heaney (calling you "messer")
And Martin Amis do
Is what the right-wing in literature
As well as McCarthyites woo.

"At heart she was an anarchist, hating war,
but breaking with the duplicitous Lenin
as much for love of Dybenko as ideology"

O to hold you in my arms again
Before the endless night


That old poem lost
It was all midnight, nightingales, larks

He stumbles to the sea
I remember writing
& of the gulls, calling
Or seeming to call

I do not wish to ply you
With a lifetime's mistakes
Something like that



"To be a friend means to find the language of the heart....No
Suffering can equal that of seeing one's comrades turn their
backs and speak ill of one's efforts."



Club underground
Dance the evil! Dance
the evil! All around us the beautiful youth
of the world - it is theirs
& we old ones go
when the show is over
& the squeeze box player
cries his slow & mournful blues
ah you! you
who see me as I was
& the young men stand in a circle
bullish their testosterone
& dance the evil! dance the evil!
show's done / shadow



II

Shlyapnikov

"Kabochaya oppositia"
not the NEP inverted pyramid -
a "deviation"
now we tap your phone, man
& we're closer down the road to Stalin

IWW refuses to buy the Party line in U.S., 1921.


& Lenin, saying reification necessary
Did he refuse to consummate
With Inessa Armand as Freud refused
With Lou-Andreas
The discipline of repression returns in the Purges
After her death, nothing revolutionary
Only the guys with short haircuts and suits in the 1960's
Not caring whose heads get busted in Buffalo, and Chicago.



Margaret Ann Morton
passing out Chavez leaflets
in San Francisco, 1974


The postmistress in Sleights (Yorkshire)
Or on Ala Moana Blvd. (Honolulu)
Here and now vision of lost love...


The fog of desire rolls in
Obfuscating all
With meaning

Or illusion



"As for promiscuity, she said it could offer little more to women
than the same old endless search, only intensely more painful,
for the ideal partner - a search from which she had managed to
free herself in the past years only by living alone."


You move me to tears
when you write
"their skulls smashed by rifle butts
Rosa dragged half-dead out of a police car"
& thrown in the canal



..."the desire to be understood...down to the secret recesses of one's soul, to be recognized as a striving human being..........And so it was that Alexandra's progressive and pioneering ideas on people's infinite capacity for love began gradually to be regarded as guilty by association with all her connected aspirations for a society in which the working class, not the Party and its organizations, would decide how best and most efficiently they could work..........Love was so complex, so far removed from its original impulses - the biological instinct of reproduction...that it was perhaps better to ask ourselves what we are, rather than what love is."