This is going to be a long post, so forgive me.
"Really rolls off the tongue."
It could be improved. "it can't happen here!" perhaps instead of "it can not happen here".
"calling it communism" instead of "called it", works better I think.
"error" has a certain finality to it, like its describing a particular noun, but "errors" sounds better.
"and into the arms of Armageddon blessed with one final moment of terror the clarity of the collapse, the punishment of their accumulated error."
is a mouthful. Too many syllables on too few lines. If I rewrote it a dozen times, it might have turned out better
"and in the abyss", should have been written "and into a abyss". I know the rule for "a" and "an", but "a" works better here. I don't know why.
"where lady liberty still stands tall and watches over a nation--prison for all. "
Don't like the 'stands tall'. Tried a few variations, but none of them worked and I wasn't really satisfied with any of them
"where lady liberty still stands, shining cold and bright, above all" "and watches over nation, a prison, beneath her the shadow of her shawl."
etc. They all either didn't work exactly, or were too wordy. So I chose to go with an economy of words, and just cut it off at 'tall' as if shes looking down silently at the world, either as an erstwhile liberator, or as a prison guard.
"I have gone praying, the darkness to cover me from pole to pole"
A reference Invictus, only inward looking. I was searching for something that took the 'endurance' of the human will (or whatever you want to call it) and turned it inward, almost selfishly, as an inner reflection of how distorted and navel-gazing the exterior world had become in the poem. So its one part "I put my head in the sand", and the logical conclusion of that, self-obliteration, in the face of a disaster like a social collapse into anarchy. If "god is the spark within" or some shit, as some such as gnostics are fond of refering to, then what happens when we live in an age when we reduce the whole world to our own ego? When we consider our lives as 'the world'? As the world revolving around ourselves? And what happens when we proverbially kill god by denying the idea? It always seems that these two things go hand in hand, these social processes throughout history. 1. reduce the world to our individual selves. "Nothing is truly knowable except our own minds", and 2. denying god.
My sin in the poem is reusing the same words, like 'corpse', and 'slave' sometimes in the very next stanza. Guess it works for emphasizing the theme that we either own an age, or the spirit of the age owns us. Modernism is about consumption, parasites are the ultimate embodiment of consumption, little more than eaters and shitters. So naturally the body of society is compared to a literal body, a dead body. And what does a dead body host? Like a temple to moloch, it hosts dead things. In this case I'm saying society is spiritually dead. Not an original take. Only that the future of 'the hollowmen' has come. We're not just living it. Because of course nothing is really living in this society. No we're existing in it, as little more than degenerated objects of the state's fixation on our own destruction. We're not just existing in it. We're existing in a *post-hollowmen society.
"with hands beggared forth for all they could grab having never known or owned nothing"
I wanted here to emphasize, instead of losing sight, the fact that this was done TO them, not so much by them. In the same way a tsunami drowns 300,000 people or a tornado murders a town without a second thought. Only difference is, it was all intentional. But then it was also probably inevitable, if determinism is true. The psychopaths who murdered 100 million people last century, as intentful as they were, were just as much a natural process, a force of nature, as human hunger is during a revolt.
"What virtue!, how mighty are thou hearts! smearing shit on the walls and calling it art"
I wanted to riff on shakespeare's "what a piece of work is man" and came up with a poor substitute. Taking this sublime and callously brutal burn of bygone days, and contrast it with the seeming normality of the daily faux outrage. because if things like genocide, replacement, and 50,000 murders/rapes by minorities has come to the point of being banal, then that which was banal is the only thing suitable to highlight now. The banal outrages are the foundation of the real outrages.
"we who have descended into the pit again and again"
I hated the old english pronunciation I had to use to get this line to work. It felt gimmicky. But I really wanted to contrast older values with the sheer debauchery. it's also why I talk about nightclubs early on, and then refer to them as whore-houses later on. Because you notice we dont have whorehouses in society anymore. But where do the whores go? Nightclubs of course. So its very much a matter of how the language has been falsified and changed, and how its colored our perceptions of the world.
"stream out after dark, to numb what is already numb"
Wasn't satisfied with this, was almost a throw-away line but it emphasized the never ending sensation seeking. And refers back to the riots in 2020-2021, which have almost become tourism events now. "come for the weather. Stay for the heroin and looting after night fall!"
"great throngs of ill-gotten fatherless sons" refers to the criminality rate among single-parent households, and ill-gotten specifically refers to polygamy as practiced through casual sex and the welfare-warfare state.
"for vampires whose lusts are infinitely depraved"
this is my backhanded form of a compliment at the audacity inherent in the levels of depravity I've been forced to witness growing up, but in particular, over the last four years. I don't admire it, and I don't respect it. It's the odd sort of impressiveness caeser must have felt watching the barbarians sack rome.
"chained to the wall and turned to be numb tuned out, and drummed out, and burned out, dumb"
'turned' was not quite what I was going for, but does mean a lot of things. 'Turned traitor', 'turned' as in rotten, turned away, turned out (raped, robbed, etc). Inspired the following line right after, which could have been reworked a little but was sufficient to encompass the entirety of the feeling I was going for. Perhaps ennui.
"completely atomized and unalive"
The first four lines of the first stanza, came to me whole cloth, on their own. 'swarms of flies' was another shorter phrase, maybe 'corpses'. I don't know. Didn't write down the original. Wanted something that contrasted from the idea of 'ascending to heaven' when you die. Was thinking back to a metal band or event I recalled, called "halo of flies", and a story I heard about how an old lady died, and when they found her, nothing was left. They opened her apartment door, and maggots had hatched, completely consumed her, and converted all her body mass into yet more and more flies. Until what she once was, was now nothing but a huge swarm of black flies. Sort of like the blob that ate everything, but for insects. Theres a certain horrifying purity in the thought. The complete consumption and conversion of anything, into something else. A "losing of the self", or the fear thereof, in the same way we all worry about being demographically replaced.
The word 'unalive' I think, in a back-splaination sort of way, I preferred over 'dead', because death is understood to be a natural state, whereas I liked it specifically because the moment I thought of it I knew it conveyed the unnatural variety of death.
"the creatures of flesh"
Symbolizes what we've been reduced to. All at once sexually, morally, and animalistically. Not 'humans', not 'people', but 'creatures'. I also like the 'fl' because it could easily be misread in haste, as 'fish', referring back to the idea of christ as a fish and fisherman or 'fisher of men'. But of course the point of fishing, is to bait or deceive the fish. Fish get baited. Hooked (something bad for them). And they get eaten. And schools of fish are prey. I like these sort of potential interpretations not for what they mean, but for what they might say, if someone happens across them, and maybe what it says about people who see them.
"corpses that move and change with the times"
Is an obvious reference to marionettes and being puppets. But specifically tied to 'changing times' or 'change with the times', parodying the notion that modernism is some how sacred. Like anti-sloganeering, or memetic vandalism.
"on the projector box designed to hypnotize"
Specifically 'designed', is a direct reference to edward bernays, and what the explicit goals of his research were. (were?, was?)
I liked the use of 'projector box', because I could have referred to it as any other thing. 'talking heads' (over used), 'television', a dozen other wordy phrases. 'projector' pulls double duty, because its a physical object thats distinctly familiar in many peoples minds. It brings to mind images of rooms that are dark, and lit by the projector, old propaganda films, wood panel tvs. And in a secondary manner, the idea of "projecting" an idea, and projecting qualities ONTO segments of the population, and the audience. Hence hollywood. Hence 'self hating whites'. Hence 'dads are stupid, women are empowered', and all the other fucked up tropes like 'magic black negros' lampshaded by guys like Key and Peele. All these, and a thousand other ideas planted in the public's mind.
'box' seems kind of odd here, but its there for a reason. Its meant for you to focus on this vague shape. You're not paying attention to whats on the reel in your mind, because you've just been told to focus on the projectors shape, its physical shape. 'Whats inside'? Might be one question that arises, at the peripheral of your mind. And the responses, if there were some disembodied voice to reply, might range from "nothing", "demons", "witchcraft", "the souls of six million aborted babies being used as fuel a tiny portal to hell and project nightmarish visions of ghoulish futures disguised as utopias for humans, or rats.", or more ominously, like a twin peaks script, the answer might be "nothing. theres nothing inside." An inexplicable box that came apparently out of nowhere (much as so much of the public views food stores as magical generators of food). A box with nothing inside,like some godless alien non-euclidean device, beyond comprehension, that appeared, as if it fell from the sky one day, out of no where it seems. A box that seizes the imaginations of millions, invades their minds by force, like a corrosive social acid spreading insidiously, a creeping flood of malicious whispers and seemingly harmless ideas. Whats in the box. "nothing." It was the only other thing that existed, along with god, before he created the universe. An eternal every-hungry force, that consumes as much as god himself created and creates. it has always existed, perhaps always will. And inside that nothing is none other than evil incarnate.
It's a poem about mass death for the sake of mass death. And evil for the sake of evil.
It's a poem about the blind 'noosphere' running the world. The high and mighty that are not even vultures, but maggots in the carcass civilization. The cream of the crop, like the psychopathic shit thats floated to the top, mentally, physically, spiritually, sexually, and economically murdering, raping, and cannibalizing the whole world like a maliciously intelligent giant boa, strangling and swallowing the earth and everything and everyone who ever existed.
It's a poor man's "Dante Inferno." Like Virgil, except, hes glad you're here and has given into the sensation that sometimes comes with madness, when those surrounded by an insane world, cannot choose between fighting it or the urge to join the mob destroying it simply because it is worthy of being destroyed.
I think I covered all but a couple stanzas. That about does it. The rest is the standard refrains. Not so much because they aren't true, but because what would be a good poem without being antisemitic or anti-anything?
If you're gonna say something, be sure to offend someone while you do it. That way someone will remember it at least.
(post is archived)