Clown, Puppet, and Beast

They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut,

so that they cannot see, and their minds as well,

so that they cannot understand.  No one considers,

nor is there knowledge or discernment to say,

“Half of it I burned in the fire;

I also baked bread on its coals,

I roasted meat and have eaten.

Now shall I make the rest of it an abomination?

Shall I fall down before a block of wood?”

He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray,

and he cannot save himself or say,

“Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?”

(Isa. 44:18-20)

Hegel’s Saltimbanques of ambiguity dawned
couture WWI, demobbed
with phony bliss and faceplainted
eyes betraying their tokens.

Existence long marches by Waiting,
ever waiting, every generation,
for the rested shape of time’s certain collar.

But shape is the phony.

After the corpse camps opened,
the puppetmaster
scened exteriors of a planet behaving badly—

Deep state down five fighting fish standoff
in gravity yanking seas--
from some object yet unverifying—
unnamed power stru(c)ts, each twitching by unaligning strings:

plaited by swizzle-sticksticka
the very there its philosopher and priest trod.

Then strings are cut by the 1970s
and the puppet slumps away.

People pass its moldering mâché homuncule aghast.
Never again!

Cementing again the plant of flags,

the fabric of the beast in training by rape and clone, a haunted genome
of Franken-circuits and alchemical obsequy
mills, resurrecting their an-euro-nal bubble by cartoil.

These flatter me:

for to live again, the dead ancestors
must ever flatter the host,
and obsequies harness and harvest
innocent enemies of the guilty,
to self-organize by codex and wing
and tame again, filter and banner;

The Beast that came itself now dies, most quickly
by the backsplash of its alchemy,
legacy of clown and puppet
occlude by better movement in the mysts,

Illusions’ shatter more easily the third wave that
shape the meek peoples’ entertainment
through the routered drippings' mock, and

the archives of horror
s(e/u)asioning.


[Douglas Blake Olds, March 18, 2026]

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