NOTHING LEFT FOR THE MIND

the cemetery of principle, part 1 (link to part 2)

Nothing left for the mind
Nothing left for the mind at the cemetery of principle
Nothing left for the mind that some poet hasn’t mushed up and served you
Like baby food

Not even loss that hasn’t been mined for the cheapest sentiment
The most available sentiment
And denied

Not even loss
That some poet of the image
That some painter of the word
Hasn’t made an illusion
At the cemetery of principle

Nothing left some artist
Turned critic
Some politician
Turned press agent
And her own representative

Nothing left that some poet hasn’t set out to praise
But only consumed
Self-consumed

And disgorged and chewed up again to taste of nothing
But milk thought
Anodyne
Palliative

And having set you onto her shoulder to show you
She takes in the vista with a sweeping gesture

And swallows the prospect up whole
Bringing it all up again

From the committee of her interior
From the ministry of good intention
For the children of poverty
Of principle

But as a featureless pulp
As a mouthful of symbols in your hand
Just recognisable
Like pieces of corn

For reasons of national infancy
Baby you’re secured
As the tube of her projection
And fed putty with a spoon
Nothing left for the mind that some poet hasn’t ripped off
And made new
That floats in its fluid

Like the corn
The coinage
That you’re privileged to receive from him

That you receive at the clubrooms
And pass at the public trough
From hand to hand
Down the bar
Down the line

The birds left
The left itself left
While war on itself
Wears on

Nothing left he hasn’t explained to you
With stale breath over empty glasses
From the narrow confines of a distant lust

And ripping the covers off the seed
Nothing left he hasn’t regurgitated
As a privilege of his class
His sex his colour or his club

That some Judas poet hasn’t originated
In an original moment of apostasy
At the cemetery of principle

What need the writer felt now gone
With the jerk of the second hand
In its circuit

What shame she had now confessed
To the cistern
Endlessly flushing
From one end to the other

Nothing left for the mind not spelt out
Not even a joke
But the dividing loins
And the hole where want lay

Ripe and exploding down the years
In spore
In the spore
Of a cathedral-sized cavity
Of cathedral size
That contains
Not only your relation to art
But your relation to war

Hate in the architecture
A rain of ash like snow
Its music composed
For the film

For the medias by somebody’s baby
On a hip at the cemetery of principle

For the symmetry
That only the horror of death
Has the mass
To fit
A cathedral’s size

Hopeful nails
In the happy eyes

There’s nothing left for the mind
But a cathedral-sized hole

Without the shape of a cathedral
Without the shape of any individual
Without the shape or face of a god
Turning in profile

Not star-shaped not god-shaped
Not hero-shaped and not poet-shaped

Only a space of sheer scale
Between us

A utopia a no-place
A nothing that is one thing
Without even the fly
Which crosses in flight

Which crosses and divides the space
Nothing has been left for the mind
That some poet hasn’t got to first
And denied

Giving you its proper name
Its symbolic shape
Answering its loss
Denying you its question.