Occasional discourse on the hate question

Choose well your language! In a glass Shaped like history, the focused eye Is utterly pitiless. Our century, Rich in indestructible paperwork, Is also a regular El Dorado

Of unintentional and/or black humor. Measure yourself therefore not just Against peers but before descendants. Some Chateaubriand waits, “charged With the vengeance of nations,” armed

In time’s mail with an icepick wit. You’d be advised not to resist him. To serve him, indeed, as you can Across some golden gulf of fools. Alas, there is no book. To start,

Serve the gods and obey the ancestors, And call a thing by its actual name. What then hate? First and foremost, Hate is the word in quotes—“hate.” A marvel of our age, a marvel even

Of all the human story; a Saturn 5 Of the art of public enlightenment; Your very Sumerians had nothing on it. We do see other contemporary work, Like “change,” but what comparison?

Just a huger sound, whacking you In the liver like a ton of heroin. You might not be sure about “change”— You know how to feel about “hate.” We won’t try to change that. We’ll

Just seal it in a bag of quotes, and Carry on with the mere word itself. Hate is like color, an abstraction Made concrete by mere diffraction. And only a binary monochrome:

Resentment and contempt, brackets Of the spectrum of personal status. If your time zeppelin lost sync And you had no idea when you were, You’d set the controls for any age

Which had abolished contempt, under Great penalty of law, tamen usque Recurret—and worked indeed the week Of Sisyphus with Virgil’s pitchfork— And, with the very same hand, yea

In the very same word, did adore Fondly as a hand-cupped chick, Seed and water, reap and thresh Year upon year, revere even As some proto-man served a fire

He could steal but not yet set, A secular coal in a shaman’s box, Nestled in grass and eiderdown, Bane of wolves and cause of soup, Heating caves and branding knaves,

A ruby defined as life itself— Resentment, the last god found Living in America. Observe yon Castle; well-made as any other; Its stones are marble coffins,

As in any age; indeed no age Seems made without its tower, But each defined by choice of grout. What is this mortar of power? What, The gunk between the ashlar? What,

You should ask. You learned all about Those old forts of contempt, whose Lime was white with human chalk— But nothing mixed on site is pure. White on inspection is always gray.

And gray is black, the tensed wire Between our stones, which takes its own Prey in its own way. If hate was not A hazardous material, it would not hold One stone upon another. Do you find it

To a fresh eye noxious? Have patience, For men have always mocked the stacks Of stone that lock their eyes in place. But marble without mortar is rubble, And life without lords soon terrible.

Timeless mind in temporal man Is the only ideal; the soul is free, The meat must serve. And please note: When mind and man divide, the Tongue and fingers remain in earth.