A keel-hauling round all his wet counsels of wounding, laborious
Despair,¹ a skinning from bar-knuckles (tattooed ‘Cool’ and ‘Rash’),
Drowning in your master’s voice, a hanging for your obedience -
Missing at your Nuremberg the familiar self-admiring moustache.
Listen to the clink of glasses in Captain’s quarters.
They’re opening the ‘45 vintage - but its body cannot salve,
Its bouquet is of rat poison. The punk philosophers who drink firewaters
And declare, ‘I am, therefore I think’,² starve
The crew of essentials. If land were in sight you could swim
For it - but the Captain’s a relativist and he’ll not see land
In his lifetime. So I suggest you mutiny before your eyes grow dim.
My query to the nihilist: you call morality the fear instinct
Of the herd, which prevents the rise of greatness; you preen
For the Creator’s role the free-thinker, make him distinct
From your life-denying valuation of the human scene
And the moral dubiety you’d see through to ultimate paralysis -
Tell me, when all ground is taken away, will Superman
Fly like a bird, or cry ‘Excelsior!’ - into the abyss?
¹Existentialism is a philosophical enquiry into the experience of oneself in the world, especially in regard to the anxiety and despair one feels when the full measure of one’s freedom, responsibility and isolation is revealed. Since nihilism, the abnegation of all values, panders to this, it becomes a counsel of despair.
The conviction that life is meaning-less makes it harder - wounds and half-drowns like a keel-hauling.
