The silent ones, the survivors,
With catatonic stares...
Red taboo is on their hands.
Memory is working them over
Brutally, thoroughly.
Too many ghosts walk among the living,
Reminding ,accusing.
Tics and tremors and convulsions
Quake the sobbing days
And every shadowed street is no man’s land.
All these corpses-
Do you call it murder or fate?
Dr Caligari stalks the asylum,
A charlatan-messiah
Who can hypnotize the absent
Back to life.
Use all your science, all your intuition,
This world will leave you guessing anyway.
F.W.Murnau sits reading letters
From his dead love
And Nosferatu’s shadow creeps across the wall.
The séance of cinema
Commences in the dark.
Fever dream documentary
Records the voodoo rat scampering
And vanishing through the moon’s trenches.
Murnau,his mind like a Balkan castle,
Stands observing a painting
By Caspar David Friedrich,
The solitary figure with back to the viewer,
Absorbed in a vast emptiness.
It is the age of the dybbuk,
Somnambulists’ paradise.
The envious dead wreak their frustration on the living,
Warriors lie impotent in their marital beds.
Slowly, implacably, the Venus fly trap closes.
As archaeologists uncover the ruins of Babylon
And reconstruct the Tower of Babel,
Fritz Lang- pirate’s eyepatch covering
The lethal glare of a heathen god-
Sketches designs for Metropolis,
The revolutionary mob rushing onward
To pull down the citadel.
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