Timformation
05-11-2004, 11:48 PM
9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq has generated a ton of rage and confusion (just look at this forum). If anyone's created any pieces that touch on these issues, feel free to post. Here's what I came up with:
A Short History of America
I
Is was not so much really
sooty tongues shoving cages of wood
across umbilical seas
charcoal
teeth swaying in the closing jaw of the ocean
Stinging the bitter
taste of an alien shore
hurling smoke and thunder
against dying spears
cluttering the path to sun and moon
through the breasts of tyrants
Who respond
sending tin soldiers up the little red streams
rusting in the mother pool
Until the lyric twang of stretched bows
becomes a distant echoing in the ears of the herd
(sliding silently over snake grasses)
towards the shimmering horizon
Ocean-sound trapped in the conch
frozen in sap on limestone tombs
The first world
II
The ancient tongues are dead
Sweat washing clean the blood-brushed plains
clearing shriveled kidneys from the earch
peeling back stones like fingernails
trailing creaking geletin fragments
Gathering th jagged bones
of drowned mothers
turning back into caved rock
The lark's cry dying
in brutal plains of morning mist
Spiders sparring in empty chambers
Consumed by the harvest
whose implements are the undead spoor
of monsters
raping the well-springs of fertility
that lay shackled by twisted hooked loops
of haywire and leather
territory to be entered furtively
borrowed and owned
but never tended
Rails leave tracks in the virgin snow
trailing into the scattered campfire ashes of forests
dodging heavy graves
threatening to spill the uneasy dead upon the sparse fringe
Whim becoming substance
III
Barbed fishhooks have transfixed my eyes
tugging them to leer at gas-flares, at
wooden pyres and trash middens
every sense panicking at shreiking colours
gaudy sounds
putrid textures
Automobiles graze on crumbling pavement
where horses did before them
and dinosaurs before them
Cities sprawl their splayed craniums of bedlam
through cavernous inches of space
the streets repaving themselves with greasy
murders
nacked theft and sticky rapes
The common ground exists between legs
(hurling volleys of spite across the neutral tables)
Of buses, trains, cafes
The curators and custodians
insane with skill
wrap oceans in a wilderness of wire
Compressing it to the size of a tennis ball
Nations are restaurants that
flash once in headlights
and are gone
(the phone is disconnected)
Out chasing the survivors of enforced life
back to the cold refuge
of caves
A Short History of America
I
Is was not so much really
sooty tongues shoving cages of wood
across umbilical seas
charcoal
teeth swaying in the closing jaw of the ocean
Stinging the bitter
taste of an alien shore
hurling smoke and thunder
against dying spears
cluttering the path to sun and moon
through the breasts of tyrants
Who respond
sending tin soldiers up the little red streams
rusting in the mother pool
Until the lyric twang of stretched bows
becomes a distant echoing in the ears of the herd
(sliding silently over snake grasses)
towards the shimmering horizon
Ocean-sound trapped in the conch
frozen in sap on limestone tombs
The first world
II
The ancient tongues are dead
Sweat washing clean the blood-brushed plains
clearing shriveled kidneys from the earch
peeling back stones like fingernails
trailing creaking geletin fragments
Gathering th jagged bones
of drowned mothers
turning back into caved rock
The lark's cry dying
in brutal plains of morning mist
Spiders sparring in empty chambers
Consumed by the harvest
whose implements are the undead spoor
of monsters
raping the well-springs of fertility
that lay shackled by twisted hooked loops
of haywire and leather
territory to be entered furtively
borrowed and owned
but never tended
Rails leave tracks in the virgin snow
trailing into the scattered campfire ashes of forests
dodging heavy graves
threatening to spill the uneasy dead upon the sparse fringe
Whim becoming substance
III
Barbed fishhooks have transfixed my eyes
tugging them to leer at gas-flares, at
wooden pyres and trash middens
every sense panicking at shreiking colours
gaudy sounds
putrid textures
Automobiles graze on crumbling pavement
where horses did before them
and dinosaurs before them
Cities sprawl their splayed craniums of bedlam
through cavernous inches of space
the streets repaving themselves with greasy
murders
nacked theft and sticky rapes
The common ground exists between legs
(hurling volleys of spite across the neutral tables)
Of buses, trains, cafes
The curators and custodians
insane with skill
wrap oceans in a wilderness of wire
Compressing it to the size of a tennis ball
Nations are restaurants that
flash once in headlights
and are gone
(the phone is disconnected)
Out chasing the survivors of enforced life
back to the cold refuge
of caves