The Anti-Messiah

Luca Signorelli, The Preaching of the Antichrist.

Orvieto Cathedral (ca. 1500-1504)

Into this wild abyss the wary Fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,

Pondering his voyage . . .

—Milton, Paradise Lost 2.17–19

Clogged clarions untrumpet Him

Sealed angels unsing Him

A thunderless God A dead God

O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb

—Gregory Corso, “Bomb” (1958)

Lest we forget, He’s human, too, the Anti-Messiah,

Ears jutting from his unappealing head,

Oracular. Gear? Sure, pants on fire.

He’s lost all sense of what his Mommy said,

An astronomic Atacama to the south;

A Kalahari on the Other Hand—

Death Valley, but, really, not to boast,

Saharan seasons on the Skeletal Coast,

A veritable Gobi Desert of the Mind,

Where all but Bulldust’s hard to find.

O Beelzebub, there’s so much sand!

Above in the cerulean sky a gibbous moon

Grins in the germfree afternoon of Hell,

And nought to quench one's thirst but Number 5 Chanel!

Is there no end to this parched pondering

That can at most cause Hunnish monks to sing?

(What, too, if a real Messiah should come,

Saying, “Get lost, you goddamn bum!”?)

Friday, March 20, 2026

A Trillionaire

Gilded sphere containing Tesla's ashes. Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade.

Let none admire

That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best

Deserve the precious bane.

—Milton, Paradise Lost 1.690–92

Like other folk, to be rich my desire,

With in second place the fat fruit of fame,

I stormed high Heaven with unholy fire,

Robbing old NickyTesla of his name!

And now, surrounded by my bodyguards,

With legal legions spent in just deserts,

I tower trillioned over Gaia's shards—

The landfill left of what was once the Earth’s.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

An Angry Rabbit?

Parmigianino depicts an angry rabbit

At the circumcision of Christ — no, it's

Two of them, the other scuttling away!

Little Lord Jesus, submitting to this ritual habit,

Regards his trimming with Nicaean aplomb.

The Virgin's steady, tough blondie Mom

Views the mohel's miniature snickersnee

In manicured fingers! Ready teddy . . .

In a Parmigianino portrait from 1523, I

Fagiolo dell’Arco saw a dead rat—

An alchemical symbol, or something like that.

It's an antique statuette, actually.

"Revelatory detail" leads the eye astray;*

Who knows, though, what the mindful might say!

Parmigianino, The Circumcision (1523). Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

*James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles ? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 204. Elkins quotes Daniel Arasse, Le Détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 266.

Thursday, March 12, 2026