To become powerful in this world
You must learn to destroy joy,
Destroy the Muse, destroy souls.
You must spray videos of your pride
In the decorum of torture, the ritual of righteous murder.
Your failure to be human
Becomes Absolute Law—unappealable.
You establish the tyranny of arid illusion,
Lovelessness, the faultless Priesthood of Death.
Each person is a Museum
Where memory is a masterpiece,
Where our secret Muse is guarded,
Past and present one vivific delight.
Yet our yearning is art.
Each Museum is therefore a person
Where Joy is studied by lovestruck scholars,
Where art is heart, breathtakingly displayed.
High sadness is here, part of our soul.
So the museum is an immortal Garden
That soars on our bliss into the future.
Here, the shapes of our hope are valid.
We see, and our mind caresses our sorrow and goodness.
Museums are therefore a garden
That must be sprayed with death
By righteously insane gardeners.
Hectic soul-flowers must be poisoned,
The muses disintegrated in ecstasies of hate.
For the failure to be human
To become absolute law, Awe must be identical to murder.
Innocence is declared guilty.
Art, identity, soul can’t exist—museums can’t exist.
The flying garden must be forgotten.
The people in the Museum are guilty
Because they are people.
But the Universe is a museum, a garden
They can’t destroy,
Where the startling stars are displayed
Like flowers, like souls,
Like the art of blessed yearning.
This Garden is guarded, this House of the Muse,
Somewhere almost forever.
The Shape of our names
Somehow, there will be safely luminous.
Yearning will also be solace, home.
© Stephen Margulies, 2015
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| Garden in Nogueira da Silva Museum, in Braga, Portugal Photo by Jose Olgon from Wikimedia Commons |
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