‘The Breaking of Nations’
a horse cough, as history laments
its own passing. What ghosts
urge these riots? Memory is dead,
flags and banners dissolve back
into thoroughfares. The East
is reliquary; bone splinter and shrapnel
mixed in daily. What ghosts urge
these riots? Barbarism looms in
the triumph of immediacy, a final exit
from the Garden of Eden, bombs
bristling moments ago at cockcrow.
*
‘A line is taking a full-stop
for a walk,’ said Klee. A straight
line is the supreme act of cruelty;
is intent without reprieve, ambush
and final judgement; Alpha
and Omega, the beginning and end,
(bullet-to-victim); the scroll of
credits, a squadron of lines;
the banding of speech, a geology
of sound; the blade tilt of horizon
that bloodies a sun; is gravity
compressed and a disk flung wide,
is flatness departing life to nothing -
spear cast on a plain at sunset.
*
Buildings off the crustal shelf,
drop shouldered - lean to, against the
sky in crazy surrealist back drop,
expressionist haze is shock amongst
rubble and safety helmets spotted
lamp-lit - an engine harvests an infant,
luckily, dead pale but pained; dust
cakes sudden caves by a broken
10th floor grounded, bedraggled beneath
re-inforcing caged. Tectonic plates
lock brake drums an instant on the
Richter scale. Taiwan slips
on the tooth of a cog.
*
Generalization of Old World
caught in the plane’s sweep. Look up!
sound makes memory after.
Dragging loss is violence; O ye
who suffer banishment, nourishment
grounded. Dearth ’tis. Rabble is
ordinary, a thing apart, the jackal
at play, toying with world’s diamonds,
spittle aglitter. Laughter strewn,
down-compressed to mud. From whence
the swing and arc, blood’s roar rose,
gave judder to the first step - before
the word, the wind in the word;
rabble speech was. In the beginning.
*
CEOs in castles cascade
in cash, silent as a cyber virus -
the invisible hides cause-and-effect,
stock taken, bartered in Japan -
via Belarus every back yard where
falls a city’s shadow looming
over the last, dead chimney pot,
not even moon can empty its
chamber pot of yellow, silver slops
into alleyways crackling with
plastic syringes, used condoms,
blood trails, slewed off into a
wilderness of free ways, high rise.
O the dead arise in elevators nightly
as Pharisees burst into the Temple.
*