Swans Commentary » swans.com July 3, 2006  

 


 

The Insurgent Word: Apocalypse
 

 

by Gerard Donnelly Smith

 

 

 

 

(Swans - July 3, 2006)   Billy Pilgrim's universe has already ended, "not with a whimper, but with a bang"; thus revelations become things remembered rather than things to begin.

If anti-Christs are to Christs as Matter is to anti-Matter, when god plays dice with physicist, odds are both and neither win.

When seers and saints speculate metaphysical ends for humanity's sins the rapture's horror they foretell with doggerel and dead metaphors.

If water and rocks fall from the sky to wash and burn the earth, then end times are like winter, and spring end times rebirth.

A hermit duly recorded his mushroom hallucination, which delusional paranoids misinterpreted as the truth for which mankind has suffered ever since.

A handy way for Hollywood to make a quick buck.

From far away, a blue planet slowly turns grey;
From far below, a rumbling indigestion solved;
From close up, ants beneath god's magnifying glass.

Some possible poet in some possible future fails to achieve nobility as the sun's chariot falls upon the earth to smite humanity.

144,000, or so, zealots ascend in fiery glory; left happily behind, the survivors inherit the Earth, then into the ashes, brick by bloody brick, consign man's monuments to magnificence.

If only religion were the opiate of the masses, then glossy-eyed mystics would fill the room with poetry born from quiet passions rather than fanaticism's visions of doom.

A minor disturbance in the space-time continuum, which, fortunately or unfortunately depending upon your point of view, removes the parasites from a long-suffering host.

Buddha sat in meditation, beneath the lotus tree, all things became illusions in his moment of pure joy, thus Armageddon passed by unnoticed.

Bloody awful fiction, bloody likely to become the awful bloody truth.

 

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Internal Resources

Patterns which Connect

America the 'beautiful'

 

About the Author

Gerard Donnelly Smith on Swans (with bio).

 

Legalese

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This Edition's Internal Links

"Lemon Head" - Hank Bunker

Swift Boating The Media - Deck Deckert

Singing Off Key In The Choir - Philip Greenspan

A Day In The Life - Michael Doliner

Endangered Species Fantasy - Martin Murie

My Buddha - Milo Clark

Demise Of The Bard - Charles Marowitz

Orhan Pamuk: A Novelist Where The Currents Cross - Peter Byrne

Three Thousand Worlds - Poem by Guido Monte and Vittorio Cozzo

Letters to the Editor


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Swans -- ISSN: 1554-4915
URL for this work: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/gsmith69.html
Published July 3, 2006



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