Look:
If mankind is a forest and you then a tree
then I am the one who stands sentry
and watches for signals in a distant belfry
one of if by land and two if by sea
a position not revered watching danger near
and screaming curdled-canticles dear
that fire is sweeping and the kindling is fear
the smoke's in the distance – it doesn’t just appear
you frogs oblivious to the quick melting veneer
to afraid to strip it away, to look in the mirror
and see yourself for what you are; for what we're
becoming – something less than...
Stop:
And you think there's truth in this verbal climbing
but it's just that what I'm saying was designed to be rhyming
and is syncopated to give it an ear-pleasing timing
like a...a........a
bum-bum-bum
heartbeat
a heartbeat pinging unbirthing mountains
on a static-shot blue monitor
in a faraway
hospital where all the rooms are
painted black and the
Doctors curse themselves.
Cursed like we are cursed,
to our death marched and the only
sound ringing is the bleating
of a New Orleans trumpet
in a funeral march – our coffin
into the dirt sank and left behind
these idolatrous sycophants who
have like pigs at a trough suckled
the very marrow of genius from our
bones, then spit back but a slim
shadow of our once impeccant brilliance.
Like the unborn galaxies of celestial mothers,
like the toxic lessons of a distempered
youth, like the sullen, momentary terror of a
child before sleep: let it be said that we
are forgotten.
Let it be said that it is as though we never were,
that the banshee curses we have screamed at the
horrors and the inequities we have witnessed
are for naught, are
disappeared, are into the ether sucked until
the great unknowable beyond has become
the altar of our yesterdays, forgiving the
domain of God and forgetting that of man:
show me a man of faith and I will show
you one of fear; man the animal, the scourge,
man the fiend who cannot forgive, merely
erase the memory and think not of the
transgressions done to him
Forget us and we will forget
what you have done to us;
but do not ask us to forgive the
pillage of our sacred rights, to forgive
the devolution of our ideas into the mire
of the ordinary, to forgive at all- No
man is not an animal who forgives; leave that
to God and damn him for it.
Forget we ever were; it is a greater kindness
than to remember the mutant bile we will become.
All of which is to say this:
Earlier I wandered outside and heard cries
behind the closed doors that guard our loyal lies
and this boy sitting near with a gold hooped ear
called it a ghost town
then took another drag and tears
slipped past his locked up frown.
I'll never know his name