Michael Annis

4 Poetic Interludes from Brave New World Order

i. TIN MAN SQUARE

Momma, I went away last night

My eyes closed for sleep

but I tricked them and I did not sleep

I went to China, to Tin Man Square

I saw children who asked me to play

and we played until dawn,

until the tanks came

And they ran over my friends

And they ran over me,

And when I called for you

your name did not come out;

from my mouth came only blood.

ii. A SQUARE METER OF EARTH

and yes, mother, you were there

in another part of the world / in another part of my dream

in another summer so lazy / sparrows beckoning in the treetops

and they came for you

my eyes scintillating under your watchful gaze

glistening like pollen / abiding the summer day

new seeds languishing in its breeze

crossing the heavens / toward a shiny new playground

bright metal glinting / in the dark of the poor of the earth

and they came for you

to investigate your activities

to question your criminality with your lover

to make inquiry of your beliefs

to determine your sanctity

to ransack your bureaus

to pick through your genes

to see just what it was you had written

to see what was inscribed in the irises of your eyes

or was it they just stumbled upon you

El Regimiento de Obediencia !

swollen this warm summer’s day

fruit of your womb a tender cantaloupe

your long rich hair flowing down

dark, musky, silken / as fine jungle vines

entwining your buttocks / swaddling

the life within your abdomen, you had felt the tiny

elbow, the small foot kick the delight in you

and they came for you

El Regimiento de Obediencia

in shrewd protocol / thrilled as wolves

in the delight of carnivoric surprise

of the stealthy mounting the trusting

in the erection of the blood feast

of the vulgar rutting the innocent

rooting out the spirit as if cleaning a pig

teeth sinking into the nape of your neck

and they pinned you with their claws

drawing blood and honey

from the soft succulent stomach

working the fruit out, tongues tucking it

between foul cheek and gums

their rifle barrels polished / smirking in the sun

their coarse tongues / suffocating your screams and pleas

their coarse beards / playing in the fountain of your tears

their coarse throats / bobbing and drinking from eternal pools

not even gods dared divert to their failing mortality

and they fucked you

that is what they said of what you had thought before as love

in the language of our own fathers

in the tongues of our grandchildren

now a contemporaneous shower of contempt

they said they fucked you, fucked you good

the many men fucked you, fucked your pussy

they said, and your anus, Mother,

their naked asses scintillating with sweat

as they rammed their throbbing meat

inside you, my mother, your teeth chattering,

cursing your belly’s firm hump

and in my dream

they hammered their lips

upon your beautiful eyes

and with their gnawing teeth

they bit off

your tender

nipples

of your milk swelled breasts

as your many layers of pain pled

from your abdomen / in a fetal voice

its head like a small simian’s

floating cloudlike

in the breeze of the womb

small lips forming a double helix,

unraveling in my dream

and the word formed

the Word looked like this:

TIME WITHIN THE WOMB

IS UNLIKE TIME ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE,

A TIME OF SUFFICIENCY, WITHOUT DREAD

A TIME OF GRACE AND CONFIDENCES

A TIME OF INNOCENCE INVIOLABLE

A TIME WHERE / BEING / IS ENOUGH

and it made me remember

this is only a dream

and it helped me turn my cheek

to rise up from my bed

to float away, up and back again,

until I was under them, under you,

peering out,

words of your child’s breath

blowing into the seashell of your ear

and they fucked you

and each one took his turn

and each took his bayonet / and each cut off your hair

and your long delicate fingers / one / by / one

fingers that were mine / given as they caressed me

and they fucked you

and they cut off your breasts / and they violated my dream

and they fucked you still

and in my dream

they cut open your beautiful belly

the belly that had tenderly pillowed my face,

as if they had the power to give birth

fucking you by scorn and camaraderie

and they cut out your baby

and threw its small monkey head

to the dogs of the dust of my playground

to the dogs of my dreams

in the dust of an opened womb

its wound set adrift in eternal space

and still they fucked you

swearing at your bloody urine

upon their hands and faces

swearing at your heart / the heart of your baby

that refused to beat / refused the tempo of their cacophony

and I wanted to help you Mother

but in my dream

you smiled at me / remembered for me,

i had already floated away to play

iii. TIMES SQUARE

—from the section The War Between the Sons of Darkness & Light

She walks Times Square, Grand Central, her very own homeless grin

trades her body for a meal; she hears of an abandoned shack of tin—

(one of many great soft hearts exploited, neglected, tormented) whirls away

finds respite, not quite shelter, shares cardboard hut with rat’s decay

away from scorn, from cruel advances, trading heart spited,

pleaing the pain to stop, the wound to heal, she’ll requite

her body for some private access in her riddled depression,

risking the play of aloneness, self-determined dispossession,

where she can be of herself, by herself, in holy virgin fleece

without sneer or savage criticism, where she can be at peace

shielded from mocking tongue, wagging finger, wry whispers, intuit

condescending voice saying, no, no that’s NOT the way you do it;

to a small room somewhere, with meager butter sand-wishes

corn chips, sweet cheap wine, lone chair, old radio lurches

out song or psalm, she dreams a cup of milk with her name on it,

a doll on the windowsill wearing fashioned hat or bonnet,

whose icon smile, frozen in truth, allows her brief escape

from demands she be verified, certified, successfully draped & raped;

where day is dark, night is light, and neither horrible,

where dignity is only as lame as it is accountable,

where her tears may fall as rampant as the monsoon

where her laughter may echo wildly among the spiritual dunes

where her hiding womb is now eternal as each moment is renewed

where her decision postpones forever if she chooses or not choose,

where neither life nor death may point out her inefficiency

where neither God nor man may accuse her of her deficiencies

where neither plant nor animal can magnify her defects

where she can look in the hand held mirror and gently reflect

the cherished grin which she’s mastered, cared for—the hated image,

painless in comparison to the modeled face, the arrogant tool

creating image with its heartless whims of superior carnage,

with its sophistry to scour her worth, to make her the fool,

to fill her with wonder at why her image is reflected at all,

the mirror image inviting abject cruelty, the disease of image

which has, in spite of its sadness, survived, has identified her

and nurtured her with its idiocy, sustains her stubbornly

in its frustration, screams out rejected self-condemnation

and yet, in its abandonment, speaks forlorn determination. . . .

She’s made up so prettily, smartly styled, well heeled,

legs smoothed in black silk (bikini panties for but a few),

stepping lightly out of her limo in definitive sophistication;

She’s made up so prettily, scarf pulled down over one bad eye,

tattered sweater, dogged with the winter’s sullen ferocities,

shuffling heavily in old men’s boots, metal shopping cart ride;

They ease down next to each other, nurses & orderlies hovering,

babes snuggling in the madhouse—relatives come to claim them:

“No, THIS ONE, this one’s OUR daughter, fuck flesh and blood!”

. . . for we have our pride.

iv. SIX

Dad, I want to tell you something

Dad, this morning I heard

two people died

in Paris,

and they had their clothes on,

and they were not buried.

I ask you this, cÉline

“—a little girl I’d attended in town once . . . died of meningitis. She had taken three weeks to die, as a matter of fact, and her mother in a bed by her side couldn’t sleep it was so frightful; so she masturbated all the time, all those three weeks, and then afterwards, when it was over, she went on doing it and they couldn’t stop her. Which proves that one can’t live even for a moment without pleasure and that it’s extremely difficult to be really miserable. Life is like that.”

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, “Journey to the End of the Night.”

I ask you this, Céline—de vous à moi demande,

A voice from out of the mouths of babes,

A dream from out of the cries of children;

I ask you this in what is left of your heart:

To watch this beautiful child play her part,

Innocence in youth of angel cloth unraveled;

For her no sunlight, no rain, no peace,

methodically orphaned in your last atrocity

she dies locked in the shadows of philosophy,

by you nameless, dies beneath your complacent rage

for a hundred years, a hundred thousand deaths

she dies in anti-climax, in shadows of her mother,

wrapped in her mother’s skin, will not recover

alone, expendable—suspended in her erasable time,

shrieking; are you to predicate her last shrill prayer

not of grief, but obscenity, embellished desperation

“. . . all of one’s youth has gone (in your aberration)

to the end of the world (so silent) in facts to die . . .”

your credo, given up in mockery, sustains the lie,

children reel in confusion: sick, hungry, and dying

fraught, no escape from your execution, complying;

when it was your own cruel eyes, your despair

which locked within concrete religions, declarations

and madness more mad than dreams from Death

under fantasies of your cold eye, immovable her breath,

while your God is seen by his turning away, desertion

the torment you portray, makes her your bastard

hopelessly floating within her own agony, then mine;

you leave her imprisoned to generations in time,

timeless in her mother’s grieving absurdity,

you have this child forsaken, alone at the end,

but we all are, when dying, no matter gripping hands;

it is hearts and tears that knit forever—not gold bands;

your heart so hardened will never understand Eternity

is constructed, renewed, by love of God, by loving men

laughing, dreaming Life these tiny grains of dying sand;

man suffering with man suffering, in any way he can,

masturbated by relentless pain, by grief, in moments

ruthless when sorrow squeezes what we cannot bear—

but not forever—by tender faith joy replaces tears

the world’s tears too numerous for earth’s years;

the seas of our hearts wash man’s future and past,

letting live and loving, as our sanity will allow us,

by grace, salvation: Man’s spirit through pain reborn.

—FROM THE BOOK “Voices in Soft Sculpture”;