I have no energy left but for revolt — the revolt of the one
who abandons the climb, turns his back, and goes
back down the hill toward the water.
The pinstriped priests sharpen the horn between their legs,
The better to carve the granite commandments
that drag me to the precipice’s edge with a pill for my mouth,
a hand for my pocket, and a push for my back.
I have fed at the supersized trough, striven to become
a hallmark of standardized measurement.
But I do not want to be fed by those factory corpses
who sit like workers in cubicles, unmoving and covered
to their hips in excrement and despair.
I do not want to work in a box turning time into regret and obedience into tears.
I do not want to be informed by the chyron streams
that feed the wells of desolation and ignorance.
I do not want to be a cog of an economy that fills the fountains
of palaces with the blood of innocence; where investment is a tout sheet
that dissolves into electrons as the getaway limousine races toward the mansion.
The sheer and final exhaustion of the rebel is his last and only triumph:
he drops the knife of his cause, gently lowers the stiffening body
of his holy purpose into the receptive dust, clears aside
a few stony pieces of the rubble, and kneels in submission
to the earth and all its ownerless teeming beauty.
For then he knows: it is I, too, like these others, who have walked among the dead.
Then he leaves his climbing body there, and turns again, back toward the water.