i)
Toughening, as though canned in brine,
we sew harmless trinkets - buttons,
fragments of bone - into our cracked hides.
What a soft lot we used to be. And so plain!
Now we will risk anything. Scarring.
Septic shock. We don't care.
We are seen to be susceptible
to the piercing winds, the frigid
and petrifying vectors of our time.
What else is there to flaunt?
All of us could die at any instant.
ii)
Obscenity is on stand-by.
The main stage still entertains
the grizzled probationers.
Improvising in their defence
a lifetime's art - granted, not yet
to be confused with defiance
of the true masters, who are nowhere
to be found. Putrefaction succeeds
where such lean virtue fails, or falls
to stupefied rehearsal of its terrors:
a plague on these conjurors.
iii)
A multitude of causes, yet unknown
to former times and farther places
(the pleasure-palaces awash with calm)
combine, not at the jagged, guard-dogged
frontier, but at the interior. The ministry
is in uproar, the ministers run ragged.
Suffering is in order. You must go
through the gamut from the _gemutlich_
to the _schrecklich_. Now fetch your coat,
your cat-o'-nine-tails. Hit the demanding road
from which your wayside rest was dearly borrowed.
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