Buried for thousands of years, poisonous suns below the ground. What logic determines the acceptibility of detritus that will kill generations and remain longer than even the memory of all our past civilisations? What arrogant genes have promulgated, what insouciance in the face of such terrible stupidity? No wonder the sages shrugged and remained silent, no wonder Lailokan and Merlin raved in the forests – what is learned at great cost ignored, what is gained forgotten or ridiculed.
Apologies for another bardic rant. Out of the news, out of mind, the people of Japan again silently suffering from the arrogant stupidity of “experts”. The tsunami of radiation will not retreat like the wave of water; it will not stop at national boundaries; it will not dissappear in a little while; it will not get better; it is a breath that carries everywhere, that keeps on as close to forever as we cqn conceive. (There is some hope on the fringes of science for remedies, unexplained, ridiculed, misunderstood ideas and technolgies: the ghosts of Tesla and Brown screaming unheard from the unfashionable beyond). I do not give up hope for viable solutions, but it is hard to imagine the tsunami of motivation needed to shift the vast inertia generated by a handful of complacent super-rich who seem to have their hands down the knickers of our ‘leaders’. THis satire is for them…..
Dance of Death
Danse macabre…
woodblock print, wordless,
unerring.
Breugal, Durer, Gya,
Marvell, Donne, Tallis, Byrd,
dear sad Dowland,
the generations of
beauty borne from the midden –
As ever,
the food of the world,
the forgotten,
lost in dirt, unnoticed.
A curl of boxwood
by the sharp burin made.
Passion and despair
carved, the only posterity
in ink and paper
as flesh fals off the bone
in the oven of years,
stripped of all softness
of all flesh.
Yet the heart of compassion remains –
a bitter laugh sweetened with tears
for the lost forever.
Here a bishop led by the nose,
bony fingers clack,
a castenet of dry laughter,
a leer of inevitability
Here a velvet lady,
snake-wrapped, bone-hard lover,
breathless, heartless,
gropes.
She, dreaming,
distant,
oblivious of inevitability,
of immanence…..
The same old justifications:
sharp swords and blunt logic…..
Marching locusts of the willing destroyers,
who have all been
promised forgiveness,
promised righteousness,
promised guiltless sin,
guileless depravity –
absolved of responsibility
by the eloquent poisoners,
the insane rhetoriticians
of respectability and honour….
Even the gods weary and die
after a thousand,
hundred thousand years…..
Earthquakes are no problem:
a shift of balance,
of perspective.
They come and they go,
readjustment, normal death.
Tsunami are no problem:
they come and go,
a breath in and a breath out,
sweeping clean a thousand memories,
leaving a tideline of grief.
Readjustment, normal death.
But now we, disbelieving in spirit,
disbelieve the power of the invisible:
our arguments faultless,
our safety margins appropriate,
our risks accaptible,
our doom inevitable…..
Setting a sun to burn for centuries
within the earth,
destroying universes to keep us warm.
Like gods, burning their children,
their children’s children,
warming their toes
on the withered hopes of the future.
Endless momento mori,
unasked for:
Suns of dying universes,
heavy as the depths of space –
heavier even,
a stain of arrogance
buried like a bone
“out of sight…”
A satire I place on the heads
of our stupid torturers,
dying gods
attempting to swamp
the sweet smell of rot
with attar and excuses…..
A satire I place on the eyes
of the shifty power-mongers,
the ones who forever
eat their offspring,
ignore the warnings,
doubt-free and glorious.
Dying gods
who believe it is all worthwhile,
a rosy future
no payment required
free credit…..
GAR.
I throw the spear of Odin
over your heads.
You are his.
Forever the fodder
of One Eye.
Sacrificed
manure,
food to all the jealous gods
who squabble
and rip the fabric of peace.
May his ravens,
ravening jaws of his wolves,
find your human heart
naked and open to the
laughter of the universe,
stripped of equations,
purged of clinical excellences,
the formulae of the demons of despair,
blown to dust,
the dust expunged of millenia of excuses,
naked, peerless, radiant, original.
A satire of the thunder of reality
I place on your tongue.
My bleached bones
and the fine white bleached bones
of our descendants, the white
soft, small skulls of our children,
the clacking bones, the tender bones-
they are my witness
they are my justification.
Eternal, adamantine bones,
invincible, patient,
relentless…….
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simonhlilly 