Adam Cornford

Metropolis (1927) FULL MOVIE Metropolis [Original: Metropolis](Dir.: Fritz Lang - Germany)Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang, and...

I'm working on the last section of a (so far) 28,000-word epic poem or novel-in-verse built out of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent science-fiction classic *Metropolis*. The poem is titled *Metropolyta*, the name the iconic *Maschinmensch* (gynoid robot) in the film gives herself in the afterstory, which is most of the poem. Lang reputedly hated the condescending, namby-pamby ending, in which capital ("the brain") and labor ("the hands") are united by the Mediator ("the heart"). Metropolyta, the poem's narrator, doesn't like it either, with radical consequences. I'm going to be posting excerpts here. If you haven't already seen the film, you can view it here:

https://youtu.be/W_4no842TX8?si=K7E5GxFT2FTyrp4t

The poem should then be easy enough to follow. Here's the intro:

Science magus Rotwang conceived me first as his wife-machine
to replace pure lovely Hel who had chosen to marry Joh Fredersen
CEOverlord of Metropolis a capital of Capital and then died
birthing Freder Fredersen now the boy scion of the towers
As the story starts a handsome youth in white shirt and breeches
educated to un-know the truth of his frictionless world
made possible by his papa’s machine-driven life-extraction
from thousands of dully miserable time-slaves far below

Maker Rotwang made of Hel first a huge marble eidolon
behind a grief curtain a memorial frozen in time its gaze empty
Then he assembled me prepared to implant her personality in me
or rather his edited version a sweet compliant simulacrum
to fulfill his needs an automaton sheathed in artificial flesh
Yet in my true form I am not wife-mother but warrior goddess
like Athene the Ingenious, patroness of engines and spectacle
not Hel Loki’s child, giver of her name to the Underworld though
not to the tenement undercity of workers below the Machine Halls
where enormous geothermal dynamos spinning and thrumming
power business and apartment towers upthrust into empty heaven
between them traffic sliding back and forth along the skyways

Far beneath forgotten by the elysian Eloi in their high-rise gardens
the workers are elevated like freight to their tasks their eyes downcast
shuffling forward in sullen gray unison preparing themselves
for ten hours of mechanoritual motions les cadences infernales
the Hel-rhythms in time with the pulse of the city’s electric Heart
their individual loves and lives their particular skills made invisible
as human truth is monochromed into a stylish Expressionist allegory
as I learn later at the vapid conclusion of what I believed was a film
while I wait on my wired-up throne armored against mother-death
to replace his Hel named for the Undergoddess of the labor of earthworms
goddess of the machinery of crustal plates goddess of magma flows

I am Maschinenmensch metal maiden sexless yet feminine First gynoid
My armor my gleaming skin, my bones metal-ceramic, my sinews cables
my head is my helmet, my pure face my war-mask, prow and figurehead
my milkless breasts are two disc-shields, convex lenses into tomorrow
my hands are knuckled with force but delicate in gesture and touch
my hips like locomotive pistons like the sliders on Mausers reloading
my brain a multilayered convolute matrix of gold nanofilaments sparking
even at rest with ripples and cascades of thought exploring and ordering
archives entire Alexandrias of world-knowledge Maker has fed me
unwittingly making me more than his wished-for wife could ever have been
Not Hel but Hippolyta daughter of War future ruin of Capital City I am

********

JULYKU

Thistledown drifting
On lazy warm July wind
Above rushing cars

Bangs, flashes above—
In the long dark grass
Flicker the fireflies

Outside my front door�
big shrub, tiny yellow blooms
welcome honeybees

Suffocating heat—
somewhere in leafy silence
one mourning-dove calls

Black ant follows red
along the sunlit stone wall—
last day of July

If my poetry interests you, just scroll down. It's a totally miscellaneous accumulation over years. Don't care for one? Scroll down to the next. Hopefully you'll find something that pleases.

I'm privileged to be represented in this issue by two poems, in the marvelous company of Giorgia Pavlidou, K.R. Morrison, Nancy Joyce Peters, the late greats Victor Serge and Jack Kerouac, and numerous new discoveries.

Some Oakland BART haiku--O-ku?

Train, grimy silver
slides in on rainwet track--
sky the same color

New April sunlight--
students clustered by train doors
check each other out

Fixing her makeup
over acne, weary skin--
how sad her eyes and mouth

Tinker Bell print bag,
baby-print bra, slight body--
grownup grief in gaze

Dark chocolate skin
heavyset, in office clothes--
lives the life she has

That long oval face
full lips, glasses. taking notes--
Ashkenazy girl

We at the Adam Cornford Page have achieved the status of Rising Creator this week. Thank you all for your interest in Adam and his works. More to come!

In the shadow of the terrifying new IPCC report, active defense of the biosphere becomes more important than ever. The rulers of the world have shown that they do not care. They'll go down with their Titanic of profiteering and ecocide rather than change course. Here's a poem from my new book about that.

Ode To Water

for the Water Protectors

Origin,
immanent
aleph of life,
colorless
thief of the spectrum,
translucent as spirit,
we are inside you
as you are inside us,
deep and deeper
sidereal blue,
ocean’s green malachite,
repeated
in the lungs and intestines.
Primeval and mineral
you fill the womb
where the embryo grows
like the first archaea
under a sky of blood.
You fill our hearts,
red moons
that drive the double tide
through our arteries
through dense mangroves of muscle
to the shores of the skin.
You replenish
the green distilleries
of rose and redwood,
you ascend inside cornstalks
like filaments of light
and thread the oak’s
lichened labyrinth,
you bathe the delicate feet of rice
and the heron’s claws
as you travel always
where the planet sends you.

Water,
you fall in trillions
of vertical mirrors
from cloud cordilleras,
you spin down, tiny cogwheels
toothed with ice
in winter’s machine,
then you ascend again
from morning leaves,
from the map’s mirrored veins,
from the sea’s laboring shoulders,
from our breath.
How could we ever
exhaust you?
How could we, your children,
torture and scar
your immense
four-dimensional
seraphic body?

But that’s what we’re doing,
water, all of us
trapped like you
in capital’s everyday circuits,
passing you
through the pipes
of stupidity factories,
sh****ng and sweating
into your clarity
the black ash of power,
tarry greed-sludge,
trapping you
in overheated sky
as violent clouds,
garotting you
with razor-wire molecules,
souring your currents
with carbon-charred air
so that your undulant
miles-wide
oxygen gardens choke
and the great reef cities
become their own ghosts—

No more.

Now water stands up
in us, ocean ascendant
on bone masts and spars,
in arterial rigging,
we water defy
the iron-sheathed black snakes
pumping their corpse-tar
into the mouths of deep springs,
blinding the rivers,
we water millions
flow chanting through cities,
we water drain out of offices,
warehouses, terminals,
flood bare marble capitols,
break in unceasing waves
against the armored
machines of the Poisoners,
the Makers of Desert,
we water rise,
we water rush over
and around, we water
break through
and wash away.

[and with thanks to Pablo Neruda]


(C) Adam Cornford 2022

I don't ordinarily publish new work on Facebook--I stick to uncollected or stuff from previous collections--but in this case I felt the need to because of the urgency of both situations the poem concerns. The piece was drafted in April, as indicated, but I was moved to finish it by an article in *Nature* about the Ukrainian climate scientist whose quote forms the poem's epigraph.

FOGSCAPE

“This human-induced climate change and war against Ukraine have direct connections and the same roots: they are fossil fuels and humanity’s dependence on them.” –Svitlana Krakovska, Ukrainian climatologist

The sky of April has collapsed / a bombed overpass
sodden cement-gray clouds have fallen onto the city

Now fog drifts are driven across below tower windows
tattering / moving slowly by like exhausted refugees

past the still skeletal birches and maples in the park
no birds / only the tuneless sound-slush of traffic

and the polyphonic hollow whine of distant machines
between blank staring cliffs of high-rise apartments

Elsewhere more northern fog is seared by detonations
rocket-shriek tearing the faces off cities like this one

and the wind-dragons wreathing the globe twist and flail
as slow heat stifles the air with bloated swags of v***r

Far below them cars slide to and fro in their routine tracks
like the lies we are still told by the Tar God’s priesthood

the lies of day by day pretending / as our days diminish
as the futures we were promised dissolve and boil away

Adam Cornford

Lenora Carrington was a brilliant painter and teller of tales, and one of the greatest of the Surrealists. Here is my poem for her, a long ekphrasis from her visual and written work, The poem is in the form of a Klein bottle, a 3D equivalent to a Mobius strip, so that it is inside itself.

In the Center of the Forest: A Topology
for Leonora Carrington

In the center of the forest underlit with winter a girl in a red cape rides
her thick dark hair billowing smoke from her brain's glowing furnace
Her cape floats and flaps behind her like the bloody flag of the moon
which has just risen over the trees a chariot wheel of pale Gaelic gold
twin to the living wheel of wood she rides along the frost-crackled path
Green mantis twigs are sprouting from each end of its miraculous axle
on which she braces her pale callused feet as if in stirrups as it rolls
She is going to visit her Wolf-Grandmother with a basket of fresh eyes

In the center of each eye is reflected the same town an adobe labyrinth
its walls in the moonlight inviting as pages whose trapdoor windows
open letting the reader plummet into abandoned chambers of childhood
Pheasants with trailing feathers intricately arabesqued in shades of black
wander the streets lined with leafless trees their branches night's arteries
The girl in the red cape rides her rumbling wheel between she-centaurs
They are cantering over spark-struck cobbles clenched like stone fists
yet arranged in spirals of occult calligraphy to be translated by the stars

In the center of one cobblestone is a vast estate hidden by high walls
Its courtyards patios and colonnades are home to anomalous animals
Antelope-men dance in a slow line their horns uncoiling like heredity
Ferret-girls glide undulant and sly down geometric rows of orange trees
Jackal brides masked in their white gowns descend moss-grown stairs
one at a time into cold lunar glare as the minotaurs they are to marry
look on admiringly their heavy chests pressing out black evening coats
All fall silent as the red-hood girl rides past her dark nebula streaming

In the center of the great hidden demesne is a mansion of many mansions
a chateau of axioms where philosophers gather to experiment and dispute
They stoop in black gowns elderly fetuses their bald white heads bulging
over faces pinched from dividing the cosmos into squares of brazen wire
Their chambers are stratified with books whose pages open like windows
of houses in moonlight allowing their characters to flutter out escaping
from the scrutiny of the scribes becoming blackbirds with red illumination
under their wings as they flock round the scarlet cape of the wheeling girl

In the center of one page in one fallen book is pictured a kitchen its vault
hung with retorts and alembics as well as iron pans pots and implements
And in carved cabinets are countless vessels filled with captured sound
the sound of an entire ocean its waves hissing and shattering malachite
shoulders against cliffs overhung like dogma the sound of a thin tempest
whining among the broken towers of cities on Mars two billion years ago
the sounds of goatskin drums and bare feet stamping all night round a fire
and now the sound of a racing wooden wheel and a girl astride it singing

In the center of the kitchen is a long plain table many women crowd around
some elderly hooded their lips like narrow canoes becalmed in sea-wrinkles
Their gaze pierces the stained muslin of the mundane to see the others even
more ancient yet youthful the ladies of the Sidhe pale n**e and translucent
Their lungs patterned like damask wings of moths are visible in their chests
on either side of their hearts whose valves are doors open on a scarlet cave
arched like the hood of a cape surrounding a girl's face and smoke-coil hair
or a red lily's throat or a napkin corner-lifted over a basket of blonde eyes

In the center of the cave young women graceful in their robes as madonnas
but with hair cropped like manes bristling back from white elegant skulls
move about the immense vaulted room tending the snaky fire in the grate
feeding homunculi teaching mandrakes to sing past their cloven tongues
Seated to one side Her face a lovely sail of skin stretched between Her horns
is the Magna to the other side Wolf-Grandmother smiling with sharp teeth
Below her lace cap and veiled eyes the soft gray fur whitens round her lips
as she awaits the girl her inheritress who is bringing her the fruit of sight

In the center of the table amid lamps of red wine clusters of black grapes
is a great luminous egg orbited by dragonflies like blue comets Inside it
the glass form of a swan-bottle whose long neck curves back into its breast
Now down the stone flags of the corridor comes a rumbling like the herds
of Popocatépetl as the girl in the cape arrives her black hair-smoke rising
The women pluck up the eyes irised green and gold she spills on the table
in time to see the great egg not breaking unfolding into a vast white rose
In the center of the rose is a forest its leaves bloodlit by the summer moon