David Menzies

“Prague had long had the sinister reputation for being the
most  vicious town  in  Europe;  the   virtuous  Ferdinand
relied  on  the baser tastes of  his subjects  to drown their
more noble aspirations.”
                             (Wedgewood, The Thirty Years War)
 

Material from the imagination
which had been repressed,
Resurfaces when the unrepressed
is being written. 

I saw the green lion dancing
under the Hrad walls.
 

Alchemy.
 

            Russian tourists were being guided into their hotel which was an
attractive  historical building jutting out onto the street, unevenly.

Time and Space are as Matter
and Consciousness:
Projections from a singular
point,
                             delirious with energy.
 

Before sleep we reached the point at which many narratives sound as one sounding as
many.
 

Night,

              Doublethink,

                                  Mozart,

                                                  Psychiatry,

                                                                           Birdsong.
 

Squatting on the ashes of Europe, reunified, boys masturbate where the madonna, white
as cocaine, slants towards the black earth.
 

Expressionless euphoria and nightfall rediscovering uncensored history, the brothels and 
opium dens and alchemists and slave ships.
 

Above the city, gold clouds transformed to black, curvaceous and funereal. Predation.
The phone rang. He answered. No response. Just a series of repetitious and disengaging
tones.
 
 

‘That can kill.’

‘What the hell did he mean by that?’

‘I don’t know. What is it meant to mean?’
 

                                                          under the shadow of a red alien sun.
 

       On a podium in Na Florenci, the square where major demonstrations against the
communist government took place, there is now a McDonald’s hamburger enterprise
which signals out to the approaching traveller with its imposing central position.
 
 

A 1930s newsreel spits and weeps into the silent crowds watching Hitler’s entrance into
the city.
 
 

Voices ricocheted in courtyards. Reversed Hegelian dialectic.

The folk mask hides the folk devil.

Beside the Vltava men in threadbare shirts sit fishing, watching the writerless hours.
Mozart’s music trips away from classical symmetry to something else. Violet veined
petals sway and flicker windwise. Reactive forces attempt to codify the unconscious.
They form a system of their own. Cupric algal waters.