Did?
Did you learn these lessons?
When love came calling, did you burn your tent and follow her flowers?
When your prison walls ran with her scented oils
Did you ease your rocks?
Did you find passage?
When beauty called
Did you bury your heart’s reply?
When bright ships passed your dark harbour
Did you fear the night water?
When joy flew past
Did you grab the ropes?
Did you ascend?
Or unravel
Frowning in passing shadows?
When you dreamed of gifts
Were you wrapping?
Or unwrapping?
When children came
Did their light fingers pry you free?
Or did they yearn and turn?
When the world opened its gates
Were you a rush of wind?
Or did you stagger before the light
Clenching your eyes in blindness?
When life called for fire
Did you flame
Or burn?
Who did you consume?
When souls opened to you
Did you caress these soft strengths?
Or stitch them as wounds of weakness?
When a lover begged
Did you barter?
Was desire a question?
Or an answer.
When pain wept in your hands
Did you taste precious tears?
Or did they dry to salt?
When anger rose
Did you speak it simply?
Or did you turn it on others?
Afraid to rage
Did you hate?
When failure wet your wings
Did you descend to rest?
Or did you grin and flutter
False in flight?
When justice called for witness
Did you stand and swear?
Or sag and curse?
When kindness fell
Did you kneel beside it?
Or smile at your height?
When weariness leaned against you
Were you a pillow?
Or did you fear wrinkles?
When you fell from exhaustion
Did you rise with herbs?
Or spurs?
When fear taunted
Did you smile once at the mirror of never?
Or did you spark and spit?
When you lost
Did you grieve?
When you wanted
Did you give?
Did you learn these lessons?
O Woman, Sweet Shepherd!
O sweet stall of domestication!
It is of thee I sing!
O sunny smile of subjugation!
I cry little for scratching
Whatever was itching
Or dressing for the couch
And TV and chips
I think in pastels now
Shudder at indelicacies
Fear germs and rude noise
Social slights and relative indifference
Hate violence; my anger is appropriated
I am sheltered, silent in scorn.
O savage serenity of woman!
I shout no earthy songs
And think before I speak
I am etiquette, niceness, cooperation
I shoulder my duties with a smile.
I am called sugar cubes, fresh tablecloths
Beaten rugs and clean closets
Shining silverware and vacuum-cleaners.
I do not grudge my repainting
For I was in truth
An uncouth portrait
Stubble, sweat
Skids in my underwear.
Now I drink from a glass and cut milk-bags with scissors
I think of the allergies of my guests
Warn my children about cartoons
Save a tithe
Consider the future
Worry about opinion
And ask about the ill.
My dog wags far from vases
My home is my world
My bed a pen of clean sheets
Made in morning.
I sweat when visitors come
Speak softly, hang their coats
What price love? I think
I am now a tidy jungle.
I am allowed my predators
Wednesday nights I play darts
Drink moderately
And think of the world.
Party of One
Oh these eternal dictators
How they scatter!
Card tricks in the hands of time
Shadow puppets at sunset…
Their lives are empty feasts
Conscience in the jaws of cowardice
Unable to swallow for bitterness
Dusty tablecloth, broken glasses
Dinners from a dead cook
How they toast their still companions!
I alone can finish my meal!
They crow
Feasting on their empty hearts.
What treasures do they hold in their hands?
Scratch their nails -- what do we see?
Why: precious days of misery!
Scattered black grains
Dark days on an endless beach.
These are their trumpets:
I shall live a little longer!
These are their tombstones:
I grew old
By dying young…
Gifts from the Robbed
They lay crushed for seventy years
They cried life from the grooves of tank-treads
Their flailing arms
Reaching only to be broken.
Suddenly
Here and now
They raise their eyes
Seeking a shroud, a vision
To cover their dead
As they wander the cremation
Of a charred utopia.
Before these foreheads
Branded by truth enforced
We smile in strange nihilism
Brazen in our lectures
Free with our stolen goods
We pass to these stretching hands
The blueprints of efficiency
And say your children died
For want of a free flow of capital.
What gave us life was not competence
But freedom, the means to man’s intelligence
But we fed freedom to secular management
Hard unions and soft currency
And cursed the poor with borrowed blessings.
Gnawed with hunger
We offer leftovers
From a recipe
We lost.
Smile, Tito
Mankind
Tight and united
Loose and murderous.
Having torn our chains from the walls
We made them weapons.
Ideally
Oh no Joe
Stalin you must believe
It was not what you smoked or ate or did
That did you in
But the failure of the shabby hordes
To swallow your positive swords.
Ciao Mao
Y’know
Misguided idealism sure beats
Cynical pragmatism
You grew beautiful weeds
Shamed only by the roses
Your heart was in the right place
Even if no-one else’s was.
I want to kneel and weep for all mankind
For not being equal to your vision
For you saw like a sword
Penetratingly
And sheathed your ideals
In the hides of the hopeful.
Closed Coffin
South Africa
A land of black and white
Russia, though
A land of gray
or
Black and white
Slipping on red
Under a cover
Of willing Western fog.
Still With Us
(in memory of the intellectual pilgrimage to Russia in the 1930’s)
These happy men
Are still remembered at the embassy
Coming as they did
In the arc of the Depression
Chief trumpeters in the orchestra of gore
They gushed their notes to the conductor’s wand
Reflecting his scepter in their ruby glasses.
No famine here!
They cried through the metal of their speared sausages.
Blind in the glare of their searchlight eyes,
Good and kind and wonderful
Crested their lips like tumbling serfs
As they kneeled on the soaked carpet
Shifting from the wriggling beneath.
Pulled in the vacuum of their direction
We dug up our clubs of kindness
(slightly charred from the stake
but none the worse for wear)
And, cheering them home, swung them over those
Whose circumstances had survived
Such organization.
White is All Colour
When will we learn
That degrees are not the shading of the spectrum
But the dissolution of the absolute
To the warring waters of absolute need.
Trial
Marx came last night
In a dream I flew with him
Over ragged Russian leaves
Sodden in a gutter of blood.
We soared over the gulping gulag
(slowed only for want of human grease)
And I waited for him to speak.
Look what you have done! I cried at last
Hoping for tears to bead his iron beard
But he glared downwards
Afire with future history
Did they achieve
He asked
The truth beyond life?
I gaped, aghast
You told them
That under the yoke of trade
They sold their souls for goods
And that for the sake of the good
They must trade their souls for yokes
And sacrifice choice reinforced
To choice enforced.
He looked at me curiously
He must have tasted the result in the recipe
For beneath his stately cloak
He drew his red book
Tapped it and growled
Such was my plan, and I stand by it
For better a purpose of death
Than the death of life’s purpose.
Blueprints
Well!
We said
Slapping our plans on the table
No poverty
No sickness
No inequality!
Grasping our plans
We found them stuck
Underneath
We found a flat marbled humanity
Squashed to the second dimension
The third dimension of life
-- disparity --
Corrected.
Social Engineers
We make haggard graves
From uprooted flowers
And call a spade a future rose
While the roses that live
And grow from earth to sky
Transgressing no blood
In the fullest blush of virtue
Become mutants in a world
Where crows, gaunt and hunched
Erupt white while pecking
For no transparent cause
Save the guilt of the angels flying pure and high.
Saint Satan
The sliding scales of brotherly love
Squeeze virtue from the visible madman.
Youth
How sad this old story…
Children born to warm huts
Laugh at the toils of their elders
And dance on dams
Jeering at the caution of floods.
Astride the wide lusts of youth
They scorn the simple structures of age.
The pillars of marriage, property
And bowed heads at old words
Hang shadows on their rise of morning.
Before the temple of tradition
These youths stand with rocks and catcalls
Afraid of why, they cry only no!
And thrash and beat at the weathered structures
Perhaps they crumble;
Perhaps their fathers are tired…
Perhaps, when the waters rise
They find no shelter in their fists
Perhaps, as they scrabble in the ruins
They weep for silence of their father’s graves.
Perhaps the reinvention of life
Before it is lived
Is sweet, savage foolishness.
Demoncracy
What vote?
Robbed of control
We sought the imposition of compromise
And truth enforced.
We paved the way to Eden
Enclosed it
Made it open to all
And worthy of none.
Opening our hands to each other
We closed our arms
Hugging our weapons of need and humiliation.
Our laws are now defined in the broaching
And our hearts clogged with the cheap desire
To move around what we did not make.
Duty
For every reason
We ask why
For every command
We cry why not?
The Lament of Earth
She came, summer I suppose
Sky-tumbling to far fields of new wheat
Her hair a whore’s-nest of pollen and warm breeze
Her dress a sway of bumblebees.
Bitch-lover of hope she wooed
Long vines and all coo and come-hither
She stirred my cellar with hot scent.
Thick-footed with peaches she sighed
Blowing my snow into flurries of butterflies.
Vapid she strode, a draping Jezebel
Stupid, happy, a no smarter suitor of a vacant woman
Dressed in bouquets, foiled and petal-bellied
I wallowed in the folds of her gown
Stalked her with lilies and daisy-chains
And played to her my begging birds.
Did she promise to stay?
This year, this time…
Pleading I rose from my quiet white tomb
Grasped at her green armour
Flung desperate orchids at her fading train
And when autumn displaced her wintry heart
Wept lonely leaves at the altar of fire, and died.
Fourth Quarter
Take a flamethrower to bare trees
Hold it.
Call it fall.
Take shaved silence to soft hills
Spread it.
Call it winter.
Take a shimmering, bubbling green goblet
Spill it.
Call it spring.
Take the stained glass of a bee’s wing
Heat it.
Call it summer.
Afterlife
Afterlife, the counselor of
Not now for this is passing
Speaking softly here
Is silent in hindsight.
Heaven
Heaven
Just around the corner
Of the infinite wall perceived
In the smooth route to ending.
Arch
Under the shade of the spreading tree
Where fruit unseen starved youth unborn
A church was built by hunchbacks
Who lay sad stone on jagged rock
Mounting their steps with twisted feet.
Seeing no sun but their shadows
Unable to turn to the sky
They scolded the night born from their bodies
Enclosed their worship in skies of stone
And jabbered inside as the rain fell in tears
Soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
When the mists came they gesticulated
Their cloaks like the webbed wings of crows
On their graveyard, a mirrored floor
They spun and grunted on footprints of fog
Below the reflected perfection of heaven.
When women came they scattered like pebbles
Weighed her with paintings and pages of books
When tall men came they were taught to bear fruit
Their backs bent with armfuls of apples
Their faces gray from the green and the red.
Outside the crows flapped quiet in the wind
Trees bent and died unwatered by droning
Inside they pinned each other to windows
Stained tapestries lit with traces of crimes
And jabbered and wept as the rain fell in tears
Soft erosion on their dreams of rock.
