The Erotic Civilization
The Erotic Civilization
Original Text
The End of the Age (Toronto: Watershed Books, 2002): 12-14.
PS 8576 .074 E52 Robarts Library
1The infinite erotic civilization we created
2is declining now. Breast and penis wag in public
3as in primitive times, when nothing was erotic but the gods,
4and they wave placards and besiege the legislature,
5demanding their right to go naked, unmolested,
6unnoticed like anyone else through the pubic airwaves.
7There are still heroes of eroticism,
9behind aquarium glass, as if anyone were watching,
10and there are still those who watch them
11in the tired chrome and neon of the Erotomania Club
12or on a last streetcorner of transvestite whores.
15the sacred cleft of the buttocks. Yet now
16it all has the shuttered umbrella-folding sad
17end-of-the-season feel that any religion will exude
18as it survives stubbornly into the new age.
19And the new age: how few steps are left to take
20for the ever-developing machine of the body
21before we get there. The distances are very big
22but crossable, given merely a life that could be counted out
23in simplest arithmetic, though it would have to last
24longer than the universe, they say, is going to.
25And it would be -- will be -- a boring journey,
26like a bus trip across the Australian desert, sixty hours,
27with the two drivers taking ten-hour shifts, each sleeping
28while the other jounces and rots and the passengers look out
29on the unvarying succession of pebbles, no two alike
30and no two distinguishable: as if a mite should crawl
31across one of those paintings of North African stone and sand
33and dignity of earth’s basic material. Yes,
34though we bury our penises in the sand, we have to see
35the erotic age is now dead and in the world coming to be
36will be infinitely pitied by our sexless shadows.
37For the time being, however, we remain: brittle
38elders, almost insensible, almost impotent, yet alive
39by the sufferance of our young, who could easily grab us
40and wring our necks, if they ever should desire to.
41But they don’t desire. Who can understand them? They care
42nothing at all for the mating song and dance
43except that its necessary management provides some jobs.
44They say right out loud that pleasure is a patina,
45something to ease the bitter with the sweet,
46and that the abyssal wealth of nature, custom,
47and personality was all illusion, a mistake.
48Nor can anything we do seduce or divert their resentment,
49now that our most alluring female is only an old
50half-bursting vacuum cleaner bag, whose penis envy
51is about to vanish forever into white oblivion.
52Still, we possess the last great strength of the erotic
53era: intoxicated terror. Let them do as they please,
54their advances can’t help moving us to the passion
55of agony and sorrow while we die… The final
56penetration, the thrust home, is coming, and they will be
57the deliverer, whatever they do or don’t desire.
58Around the last salons and saloons the human wave
59mounts and howls willy-nilly with an electronic chuckling,
60we can hear a click-click-click of commercial stiletto
61heels: an undreamt body is stalking to be sold naked,
62to be chained by the wrists to a white pillar
63in the flap-snap-flop of the laundry of the future
64strung out the windows of tropical highrise slums.
Notes
8] The Antediluvians: those who lived before Noah’s Flood (as described in Genesis). g-string: thin strip of cloth covering the genitalia and buttocks and forming a shape on the body like a G. Back to Line
13] bromide: tired saying, proverbial wisdom. Back to Line
14] decolleté: low cutting of a woman’s bodice to reveal “cleavage”. Back to Line
32] Jean Dubuffet: “1901-1985, French painter and sculptor, made an impressive series of paintings as described here in the period after the Second Word War. It was Dubuffet who, in order to group primitive art, naïve art, and the art of the insane together as a phenomenon, coined the term art brut, which he preferred to the arts culturelles” (poet’s note; p. 51). Back to Line
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2004
Special Copyright
<b>This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of Albert Frank Moritz or the Watershed Books permissions department.</b>