Eurydice Dixon June 2018
There: at the beginning of the end,
we thought we had invented sex.
Our parents,
fumbling
in their fetid dark embarrassments,
cast long shadows on land
Puckered with the scars and scabs
Of bomb and bullet,
Had nothing to say to us.
Lest we remember.
Baby booming –
The click-track of the Geiger counter
Was not the beat for us.
In beads and feathers, banded with braid
We made up new dances,
pin wheeling with limbs of light
through the smokes of dreams.
The four piece band in the corner
Strummed ladders to the sky.
Embedded urgent tyrannies,
Gaudily repainted,
garlanded the old dispensations.
A new shine on the old crimes –
Repression, possesion, disparagement and the
Selfish thrusts of the wagging pizzle.
There was some sort of joy
Under ragged blankets,
Though the love was not free.
Women still paid the long old debt –
the children that came,
The affirmations and love songs
Left to blow down the road,
The abandoned luggage.
Nobody asked Alice.
New songs echoed from old barrels
As the tunesmiths took the money,
Parleyed it for all that glitters
And rotted out the earth and sky.
Lives that strives and burgeons
are beads on a wire.
When all that breathes
Becomes things:
We sour like the dumpster
Of a derelict’s dreams.
Thin hands that thought to play the lute
Tear with thickening fingers
at the crusts of our daily bread,
Leaving crumbs and ashes.
Reclining on a tourist terrace, gin drunk,
funded by the superannuated
Investment in a million bullets
And the burning of a million forests.
Oh my children,
to have been gifted with this!
So lost now. So lost.
Limed with the light of myriad flickering screens,
Days spent in pointless posturing,
With a bucket full of lists to tick
In a con-trailed frenzy,
Leaving the quivering shreds
Of a browned, curled dry waste
where once tall trees waved.
Yarrow stalks are scattered
In the hot winds of
the burning of the brain.
Oh my children,
what have we done to you?
Stalked in the afterdark park by Death
In a drugged-raging travesty of the act of love.
Bought and sold by sweaty
Men in suits for the privilege
To scramble in the gutter
For their loose change.
Broken by blasted bricks
In the suburbs of some proxy war.
Floundering up the beaches
Of an unwelcoming shore.
Turned back from the gates
Out of which shines the last
Of the light of the darkening world.
Cellared in a godfull stink of hate.
Strapped with bombs
emerging to murder street market,
Mosque or kindergarten.
Oh my children,
With what have you been left?
Shun each other?
Flinch from smiles and hands?
Will your lonely children
Nurture the last flowers
In armored hermitages
In distant valleys?
Hand feed the last fish
In the last plastics free pond?
Watch the last lion die of old age?
Each alone for fear of the other.
Which one of your lonely children
will be the last to see the last star
Through the last gap in a shrouded sky.
What will be your excuse
When The Red King finally ‘wakes,
At the end of the end?
we thought we had invented sex.
Our parents,
fumbling
in their fetid dark embarrassments,
cast long shadows on land
Puckered with the scars and scabs
Of bomb and bullet,
Had nothing to say to us.
Lest we remember.
Baby booming –
The click-track of the Geiger counter
Was not the beat for us.
In beads and feathers, banded with braid
We made up new dances,
pin wheeling with limbs of light
through the smokes of dreams.
The four piece band in the corner
Strummed ladders to the sky.
Embedded urgent tyrannies,
Gaudily repainted,
garlanded the old dispensations.
A new shine on the old crimes –
Repression, possesion, disparagement and the
Selfish thrusts of the wagging pizzle.
There was some sort of joy
Under ragged blankets,
Though the love was not free.
Women still paid the long old debt –
the children that came,
The affirmations and love songs
Left to blow down the road,
The abandoned luggage.
Nobody asked Alice.
New songs echoed from old barrels
As the tunesmiths took the money,
Parleyed it for all that glitters
And rotted out the earth and sky.
Lives that strives and burgeons
are beads on a wire.
When all that breathes
Becomes things:
We sour like the dumpster
Of a derelict’s dreams.
Thin hands that thought to play the lute
Tear with thickening fingers
at the crusts of our daily bread,
Leaving crumbs and ashes.
Reclining on a tourist terrace, gin drunk,
funded by the superannuated
Investment in a million bullets
And the burning of a million forests.
Oh my children,
to have been gifted with this!
So lost now. So lost.
Limed with the light of myriad flickering screens,
Days spent in pointless posturing,
With a bucket full of lists to tick
In a con-trailed frenzy,
Leaving the quivering shreds
Of a browned, curled dry waste
where once tall trees waved.
Yarrow stalks are scattered
In the hot winds of
the burning of the brain.
Oh my children,
what have we done to you?
Stalked in the afterdark park by Death
In a drugged-raging travesty of the act of love.
Bought and sold by sweaty
Men in suits for the privilege
To scramble in the gutter
For their loose change.
Broken by blasted bricks
In the suburbs of some proxy war.
Floundering up the beaches
Of an unwelcoming shore.
Turned back from the gates
Out of which shines the last
Of the light of the darkening world.
Cellared in a godfull stink of hate.
Strapped with bombs
emerging to murder street market,
Mosque or kindergarten.
Oh my children,
With what have you been left?
Shun each other?
Flinch from smiles and hands?
Will your lonely children
Nurture the last flowers
In armored hermitages
In distant valleys?
Hand feed the last fish
In the last plastics free pond?
Watch the last lion die of old age?
Each alone for fear of the other.
Which one of your lonely children
will be the last to see the last star
Through the last gap in a shrouded sky.
What will be your excuse
When The Red King finally ‘wakes,
At the end of the end?
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