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.
—ALL COPYRIGHT © 1991, 1992, 2003 BY MICHAEL ANNIS
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”;
COPYRIGHT © 1986, 2003 by MICHAEL ANNIS