My blog staff of thousands didn't have to do much to persuade me that Heathcote Williams's newest dissident poem, a rhymed marvel of CAT-scan clarity, will be seen one day as a YouTube classic. Here are the opening lines transcribed from the video in four-line stanzas:
Tangled vegetation sprouts from each orifice
From his mouth, his nose, and his ears
Signifying the creature's urge to merge with nature
And rouse inhumanity's darker fears.
He's Dionysus dancing drunk around maypoles
He's Pan stamping a cleft foot on the ground
To awaken the sleeping Earth's spirits of springtime
As winter dies and a new life force is found.
Thanks to subversive stone masons in the Middle Ages
This green remnant of man's pagan past
Finds its way onto church ceilings, corbels, and bosses
Along with Sheela na gigs mad with lust.
Williams tells me in an email that Cold Turkey Press/Sea Urchin may be planning a print edition of "The Green Man Is a Green Terrorist." If and when that happens, we'll will pass the information along.
Until then, don't miss his recent environmental polemic "Selling the Earth" or a brilliant masterwork, "Shelley at Oxford," which offers a new take on the poet-revolutionary among the English Romantics. Both are also presented on YouTube with sublime narration and montage by Alan Cox.