Beautiful is not the shape of things assuming heaven
As a sphere where pure unblemished nations lie;
It is a mirror smashed at angles wrong toward earth
Its odd revenge flung down, false teeth and strict cannibalism
On the vortex of the still becoming man.
To speak of beauty is to lie where beauty has devoured,
Splintered as a thousand tears of glass
That devastate a widow's arm. The soul grows in hideous fire
And rakes its wordless being on the world, unfolding
That real thing more than real, perception's edge,
A vision of all these ruined things arising
In onslaughts of peace rifting temples old as wire
Torn from a heart. It is the mind's tornado:
Do not wait in the basement for calm to come.
Unskin fear's parasite, the heart that craves itself
Surviving, to that cold unthinking
Nerve laid bare in a palm.

(It is not this– this violence, this flowing germ:
It stems from this, its radiant spike unravels
The cool recollections of furious night.)

Beauty is the boy who sees death
Torn with life:
Hologram blown, bent
To a shivering deep, to resurrect
like a gathering god
an unfilled sentence,
Refusing the rule. He stands in the threshhold
of the fallen world
Swollen in death, like a drink poured in a glass
then frozen, pure urge emerging
from the wreck of death–

This is the word that starts the world,
When gone forms crack
And scratch their names into the soil–
The terrible oblivion of a scarred title,
A nude expectant hand
That traces the chasm of ruins
It dreamt of the new world...