Jet Powered Suicide

by Philip Lamantia

Just before landing
        eerie sound like metallic gut string of
        atonal eeeeeh!

My first con on the system
my first big income justification of
        pariahic wandering
the poet paid off by oblivion
thanx to airline insurance!
the what’s the matter with him ended
and some sad
young beast now conjures the fatal axle
change more than orbitical tilt
stares thru my magic as I stop
the flow of verbiage
coming from fission of flesh
become spirit and vice versa
my phantoms ride to port
as this plane’s wheels crash land
and recover
and what if I should smoke out ?
Ah some happiness this could bring
by lucre’s gloomy hook
grown beyond my frame’s obliteration
Death I think I’ve felt enough
and seen a set of beings
black, snowed, god like, demonic, uncertain,
and all my work, stunned, frozen
like this ghost plane thru window
while landing
the virgin girl next to me
doesn’t want to crash
and it’s a grim joy
on brink of wide eyed wish
thru oblivion’s blinding core

for thee o twisting obscure futures,
        mine and theirs,

lost over Chicago

gods of antique blood memory
and angels form transcendent flights
even Moloch’s maldororian visage
sexual blue/stalactited tropic of
      mephitic duration
and the whirling depth charges
and heights of love light!
Ah the communion of spirits talking
vegetables, singing stars,
cruel gods gored my loves
I hemorrhaged for man thru
voiceless midcentury
Faults of sensibility
and those traps time set
for those mad by loneliness
and sane by horror’s objective
      existence
Nation of the Blind Beast
For it’s best to go down to
death and live its frost
than pile up Woton’s pride
better to love one night without
        strictures
release of Erato triumphant
than thousands of dull armies and
     prisons of psychiatry
Oh! foolish time, dryfucker’s
         paradise
I would not see more
and my theme’s Assassination
       stares out
to another world come
back from pre dynastic real forests
devoid of gasses
where ghosts materialize
to haunt you Oh beautiful
    opium creatures!
Yes, fiends of sick religion
      and sicker mankind
under the metal Mocker
my flesh bleeds cut from earth
though I’d return thru Jeanlu and drugs
Oh oblivion’s welcome from
steel compartment minds
having less than the moss of
           tombs
to show us
Ha! I’ve come back from death
        screaming I
want to die!
Life that’s not given to extasie
      /erotic wildness /
the outgoing ten thousand foot
depth and from it
    orgonotic light
Life that’s less
        than
    frontiers of
        poet’s madness
eye of Unnameable Vision
          rolled on
          pages to|
catch your spinning souls
Life’s not
blood /spurting soul knifing
    DELIBERATE
    CRIMINAL
     ACT
Is NOT.     And not it’s ended,
as star
          watcher
           skyred.

previously unpublished; late 1950s

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