The Genocide Aisle
Schafe können sicher weiden
J.S. Bach/Salomon Franck
Closer comes the screaming knife
The Smiths 1985
January's snow seemed more sanguine than usual
when we'd trudged from party to party
fighting shame with pronged advance, twisting beauty towards destruction
on that regretful tributary of the Styx.
January's frosts are no more crystal than that pool
soaked in riverbed, yet it remains un-blushed, un-reddened,
lambs chance their tongues might not disappear should they drink it when it revives;
I believe them right, though when I edged myself from the mechanics of the genocide aisle,
thousands of their fleeting kind hoped their silence
would remind me of when I wasn't listening.
I look back at thousands of my kind - genocidal gluttons -
with frosted gleams on their carving knives -
sure that lamb-faced water-eyed girl might begin to listen,
a lessening of her primal malice, as she stares at the carnage piled up at the till
An Address By the Right Honourable Lah D. Dah-Tosspot, Member of
Parliament for Poltroonshire
My Lords, others,
I have recently come to understand that there is a certain breed of man, (others too),
who, in spite of snipping loose mother's apron strings from his grubby muck-soiled digits
somehow claims now (anticipated laughter here)
that we, yes, WE
are indebted to him and his pan-international fancies.
I ask therefore, it is not reasonable, that in the year of the good lord Nelson, two-thousand, two-hundred and twenty-five, that we should instead of cowering to the backward beasts of wherever in the colonies they originate from, we should snip those apron strings from their own future, and set our own selves free from this fantasy of liberty, fraternity, and equality for all man?
After all,
things seem to be hotting up (guffaw) in Africa once more,
and with the reds (I think they're still red, yes?) and the yellow man
basking in opportunity, isn't it time we took to that latest trend our restless youth, no longer obliged to national service are doing?
Namely, having a jolly good time with those, what are they called - weegee boards?
We'll raise dear Randolph, dear Maggie, dear Mr. Powell, we'll knock on Frannie Drake's door and give him all the proles he needs, we'll head for fuzzie wuzzy shores once more,
and show those spud-munching ingrates across the pond how strong we've become since we shredded all our safety blankets!
Huzzah!
Terrence Malick Crouched in a Field of Wheat, Néstor Almendros Nearby
Belief in this golden age, in one sun-freckled God, in a light almighty,
in a careering prairie storm, in a burnt-sienna brown,
follows this prayer
to a church made from dust gathered in fields where wheat reaches
height numbers mock, or simply do not compute.
No numbers please.
It's a shape of brown
as much as shade
whereby all spoken and entwined resonate
building a slow slow dance
with a twig of orange-patterned time,
standing, kneeling, becoming that feeling,
of a ghost stroking a mirror…
School-House in Khirbet Zanuta
After seeds stop being seeds
they achieve something people somewhere know as life,
some seeds grown in odd and eerie towns
painted red after someone's left
and the smoke never knows just how black it’s been -
seeds slipped between a crack in a strange and sky-less town,
where flags face the sunset
rather than bleed from it -
smoke being smoke after all,
life being life,
angels of death
the masters of the rubble
where the seeds
know nothing,
in the black and the red
and the sorrows of the withering, soil mute and brittle,
every seed we sifted through wafer’s bone - painted futureless
in the hemorrhage of heartbeats,
around the school-house
in Khirbet Zanuta
Cop Car Turns Around at the County Line
I've become invisible at the speed of sound,
accidentally so, I plead,
San Francisco's iron horse lives answered for me this puzzle
that sunshine's spoken heretics
bundled my yellow-breasted confessions in,
a paper-chase shadow impersonating angels
who lied about being me.
A waiter who knocks on my hotel room door
whispers prophecies about his lover's murder to me.
Close to the desert there's little water left,
a native man so drunk I think he's read my palms
and ambushed my sorrow from me.
I've become invisible in slow motion,
the stopwatch falls in love with my secret
Dogs Sleeping on the Street in a Central American Village
How dark invites itself inward
is an open-ended question,
why (particularly) green looks greener in darkness, is not my first thought clamouring to write this
before I've fallen victim to a whole cattle drive of minute's dirty seconds
which is why I remember why the river's alive and never dies
in behind the whores and lepers and marketing androids
who are nowhere near the perfection of trees
of how beautiful its tongue thick stench the hottest summer's night is
and television is beautiful enough to kill itself and be like like Jesus 7 hours later,
how darkness enlightens this, I've forgotten.
I am real, imagined,
pissing from a window to a climax of suburb's starving light
gives me clear advantage
when I fail to report to every bruise
my clockwork eyelids stretched to feed the urine-swollen moon.
This is their report. They are dreaming sinfully and sacredly.
Allen Ginsberg would be 99 this year,
somewhere else in space he would be 956 this other year wholly absorbed in its portly penance.
Inside the sky I taste rust and smell its warbling water,
distracted by a shooting star and its need to bring chaos
to what is chaos or maybe a state of being some call enlightenment
I have flown in my slipstreams to those dogs and I sleep beside them, hot, throbbing, sincere
Quaaludes and Dinosaurs
Yeah, he calls from this diner saying he'd discovered quaaludes weren't extinct.
Nor were dinosaurs. Oil is made from dead dinosaurs,
dinosaurs kids play with are made from oil, such a homage, such a homage,
calling me from a dead town that a diner buried its best platoon underneath
to hypothesize odd things about quaaludes, facts about dinosaurs.
A band are about to park outside that diner,
their van is early 80s, nickel brown and willing to trust its drivers,
they'll be polite to the waitress, call her m'am,
laugh not too rudely at private jokes
about the drummer’s difficulties getting back from Mexico.
The bass player's very good, best in the county.
None of these facts he transmits.
His mouth had an issue with his jaw, his heart already given in.
I guess I had to be there watching those plastic blue Valkyries open their wings and form a pencil nib V-shape down the exo-skeleton highway,
because when he hangs up I feel how I felt
when I lived on the 99th floor in 1978 with Det. Lennie Briscoe
"There'll Be Ne'er a Drop Left in Kilcullen by the Time I'm Horseback..."
As long as there's eternity
there's smoke of songs, smiles of shadows
and the patron saint of blah blah blah
weaving her son's damnation on days bleaching her 21st birthday.
She'd wiped clean her fingerprints, which bye the bye was all that mattered,
a torn-apart railroad track running near that moonshine reservoir
her boy's daddy lurked around at sunrise,
me alert to anything the sheriff needed to file on her.
Her boy made inroads from 24-carat despair,
the patron saint of blah blah blah
going round in cycles,
his dust risen through the cackling spokes
on miserly country roads,
the prickly pyramid roof they'd planned their cyclones under
jabbing handouts from the unwitting heavens.
Bye the bye, they'd everything to get by,
fork-tongue confession,
kerosine-tanks drowning evidence,
and footprints ragged on the golden-path to church;
bye the bye all that mattered
was keeping dried-out tongues
from drowning in lesser-evils than their insidious blah blah blah...
Song For Jessie Garon Presley
There was a burning boat that lived inside my body
that was cruel to itself, that did not eat, lest food was a current from a live wire,
that poetry's reasonings were butchers of water
who craved to fall from wicked Greece,
and they did fall from the gathering sky
and left nothing reasonable or secure to end their genocides -
a jumbo jet has injured the sky,
there are enough clouds to patch its wound,
enough heat to chase me around town, a sack of gambler’s silver hung to my hand.
The burning boat inside my body was an invention,
coiling in the horrors of spirits who giggle like snakes in me,
and ethnic workers diminished darkly in the gardens who watch me, believe I am a monster,
sipping my coffee
in a contorted galaxy
with a latrine in each bedroom.
If Jessie Garon Presley was reincarnated,
what chance is there he's among them
among me, among blue dust none of us have seen
because pink is a colour our eyes look for
when night clicks its spurs on its holy steel voltage? What chance?
Nancy
Nancy neither wanted nor needed to impress me
though statements like "Whitesnake in their early days are criminally overlooked"
went a long way to make her case should she have wanted one.
As I say, she didn't.
She wrote and directed 16 episodes of Miami Vice in another dimension,
that was a good move in my book, excelsior Nancy.
Nancy was 5ft 11 barefoot,
5ft 8 in heels, how she pulled that witchcraft I don't know,
it sure impressed me though when Nancy never laughed at my jokes,
asking me why I had such a sweet tooth
I told her I actually had three.
Nancy laughed for 2 hours after that, not hearing a word I'd said,
she was laughing at a Jonathan Winters skit
she'd written for him after he'd joined the mightiest of the high in their resurrection.
Nancy works on the fifth floor of a stockbrokers in Crooked Jawbone City
making movies for high financiers who overestimate how sharp
with a Smith and Wesson they are, even powder-nosed or sinless
Nancy's three thousand light years smarter than those boys ever are,
heads rolling and laughter in the aisles,
Nancy takes out the trash sometimes,
and they wait silently for moonshine to disappear
before they cut themselves free,
in the illusion they'll get their vengeance
on Nancy -
Forget it,
boys
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