Cam Scott
CONTRA
“Total risk through global refusal.”
—Paul-Émile Borduas
A Crimson Sky
A Dark Background
All Enemies
All Gods
All Odds
All Things Ending
An Infinite Horizon
Atheism
Common Sense
Democracy and Equality
Destiny
Fairness
Freud
God
Happiness
Health
Intellectual Monopoly
Interpretation
Love
Medical Advice
Method
Nature
Pain
Perfectionism
Ratzinger
Reform
Religion
Schooling
The Boards
The Day
The Edge
The Empire
The Fire
The Flight of Spring
The Flow
The Giants
The Gods
The Grain
The Hard Angle
The Law
The Light
The Machine
The Night
The Odds
The President
The State
The Storm
The Stream
The Sun
The Terror of Neoliberalism
The Tide
The Tide of Years
The Wall
The Wind
Their Will
Thrift
Us
Wind and Tide
THE HALL OF FOAM
(after W.H. Auden)
The tiers are trammeled by the chavs:
This loss of power really smarts.
The punk is pricked by poisoned darts,
Grave angels inked into her calves.
Fanatic crow nocturnal goons—
The hands that frisk you fondle, too,
Provided that your flesh will do
As fodder for masked epigones
Whose noble arts must now attend
To backroom odes and party tricks:
These help the living take their licks
And teach the dead not to offend.
As cybernetic think tanks take
A softer stance on governance,
Apologists’ paranoid rants
Hit notes of feeling; mostly fake.
Our experts may deduct hotels
From taxes they are wont to pay,
But do they shudder as they lay
There, basking in historic smells?
With insufficient room to move
The water-fatted fowl awaits
A world beyond blood-spattered gates:
Its angel is the rat-like dove.
Below our ken, a pathogen
Has commandeered the nucleus.
It makes no difference to our “us”—
The present must begin again.
BLACK METAL SAMPLER
I.
The wind whips through the trees.
A shot of yellow phlegm
Snakes to the drain.
Another hairdo is destroyed
Elastic over fist in fits
Of sexual abandon, which
Is not a synonym for white flight
Quite, though such transcendence
Is reserved for wealth
For which oil flows below
The greasy ground as on command
And water from the taps—
Unwanted manna everywhere:
Jawbreaker bagels towering above
The garbage bin in mounds.
II.
Meanwhile an automated pummel
From the Grundrisse threatens your
Retirement: you elope with a bank.
You book a wank for several
Weeks next Saturday
And enter a celebratory sulk—
No punk left willing to profess
A foolish admiration for the Bolsheviks,
But every Ian with an iPhone
Has a hard-on in his ear for Burzum:
The Norse Blues-hammer, an illiberal
Killer, each bland socius his own
Anachronism; and if every
Politics a pact with Satan, why not
Get it right for once?
III.
Design your own parade: I’m in
The bath with candles and
A goblet full of cherry linctus,
Training for the flood.
Cam Scott is a poet, essayist and improvising non-musician.
I enjoyed reading these. Word play and thought.