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- Armageddon
by
Sunday, December 12, 2010
To all who were not born as heirs to beauty
the memory of the flight of Icarus is dedicated -
you will not know even the dry bones of such exhilaration,
or how, from a loom of wings we are each woven softly
into delusions of great heights.
Zeus was a travelling salesman
who cleared a trail through lovelessness
with his bare tongue.
He returned with trench warfare and croissants,
paid for with the thin vertebrae of your finest warriors.
His backbone was the litmus for the battle.
His mistresses had breasts like slipknots;
their truths were dressed in leather - they had whips
and devilish instructions.
He tried to sell us life,
but we knew that disaster had been built into the product.
taste me like you taste a delicacy.
meet me on the same corner that you meet doom.
(In the grand ballroom
situated elsewhere in this poem
Hitler tangos with a headless mannequin,
and the great flaw is that he moves gracefully:
in such a beast we want uncertain footing on the parquetry;
we want an uneven floor; we want split loins;
femurs cleaving the quadricep,
torn buttocks, sprained ankles -
we want the demise; we want the end; the end
is nigh...)
of all the wastrels i have worshipped,
i have loved their flesh like the earth.
The wilderness offered the veil from sin:
we frotted against the walls of caves,
we took hibiscus balm to ward off cataracts,
we studied the law of the jungle in a public school.
Too soon, the swamp of hidden blessings was infested with hogs of prey,
tearing new vents in the earth's crust, snorting in unison:
the skirts of the universe could be heard billowing
into the nothingness beyond.
Our faces had become whipped
with sands that had fled from the constraint of the hourglass,
leaking time;
the air was filled with disembodied laughter
deep enough for whales to dive in -
so in filling the donkey's panniers with the sacred juice
that was stolen from the temple,
we bled into the horizon,
strokes in a watercolor, with ancient maps
and satellite navigation, searching the cities for new madnesses.
On random corners, dilettantes juggled the heads of prophets
while savages whistled the anthems of lost archipelagos.
A washer woman who gave birth to clouds
caught the scared eyes of a teenage mother, panhandling
for the will to live.
With the death of chimney stacks came the demise of sweepers,
craftsmen, we were told, had eaten the locus of extinction,
the fat grew fatter, and spat venom at the chocolatiers.
Propaganda floated among the skyscrapers like dirigibles,
immunising the sexiest against aphrodisiacs;
immunising man against woman;
immunising the only way out against the will to escape:
to transcend the bromide and snowclones and the parade of horribles,
holy men and monks gathered on the rooftops and sifted
the rising noise with lariats,
forgetting all that they were told in the lamaseries.
we had worked the lava into a fine lather;
we had scarred our trembling hands with hot curses.
From the slums in the foothills
dusty children came running;
from the barrios in the wasteland
dirty children came running;
from the mansions on the islands
little pigs came running;
from ghettoes on the perimeter of the scorched earth policy
burnt children came running:
they saw love in a quadrangle downtown,
convulsing on the flagstones with a slit throat,
and the world carrying on about it, paying little attention,
explaining to their phones
that the chic will inherit the earth.
Take care, keep safe, and stay beautiful,
With love and peace,
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