Your Poetry Dot Com - THE HUMID PERIMETER

THE HUMID PERIMETER

Which one of you would kill the offending issues
Of self of life,
By sacrificing it’s precious extreme and beauteous strife?

*

Who is afraid of Elias,
See the lightning shapes of god or
The devil’s volcanic facial fires?
Who’s your Jonah? Jobe caressing spiders,
Your societies’ perfect passive sobrieties.
Chief censor? Visions, adverts,
Techno-ratic, addict perverts.
Untesting opium,
Unsettling sanctum.

*

Come with me down the streets
Of unrealised dreams. Here happyness has slowly
Dripped away, like water out of your cupped childhood
Hands dripped away.
Remember dry thirst & moist satisfaction.
Here impact & ambition trickle
Down the gutter, swallowed in the corner of some vast
Grey-toothed mouth.
Somewhere, sometime, every idea & aspirant
Thinks & dreams & thinks he dreams as original as his fingerprint.
But here every dream, loss and heartache, longing has
The familiar shadows of a neighbour’s house.
Only acceptance, survival & surrender
Reveal the painful prints of the unique,
The methods in waiting & self deception.
Down such a labyrinthine & bedecked ghetto
Watch despair unfold like asphalt.
See the tragedy of loss in every cemented brick.
Feel society’s even & safe worship,
The sojourn in suburbia, waiting
Come deliverance.
The gardens sing of these Camelots & coronets
Slowly dying there.

*

I played in the gutters often as a boy.
I built three masted frigates
From corks & toothpicks,
Battleships from straws & ice-cream sticks.
There I christened & launched them,
There they ran before the breeze
Sinking to a concrete maelstrom.

*

I remember something?
Arts older than the planetary wheels.
It’s an instinct an intimation,
The dragon’s shadow across the landscape,
The trespasser over your grave.
An ancient mosaic in blood,
A familiar scent in the nostrils.

*

The explorers of Empediclian mountains,
Deserts, rivers,
Readers in pots of ancient volcanic vastness.
The town’s afraid of fear, the wanderer something.
Bars on windows,
Daughters in silk hose,
I see you through the key hole,
Let me touch your sweet soul.

Morning in the market-place
The charlatans as shopkeeps
Congeal with congegal purses.
In emporios & behind bars
They recite their register verses,
“Buy low sell high” he whispers,
“That’ll be $9.95" he sniggers.
They conspire to vanquish & excommune
THE DRUIDS OF RUNE
THE PROPHETS OF REASON,
SHAMANS OF BEAT
SAYERS OF TREASON,
SAGES OF STREET & WITCHES OF WOOD,
ALL THE ANGELS GOOD.

“Sweep them from the corners,
In unprofitable dust they scorn us.”

Mental gypsies, lustful mysteries.
The beggars of spirit & lepers of future,
In rich cloaks of ignorance their profits they nurture.
A home range &
Rat trap,
Flap jack & fly crap.
A whore exchange
With gold for change.

*

When the fraternity of natural mistery is forgot,
A universal corpse begot,
Only the assassin’s heavy pocket
Is left for profit.
Ledgers, notebooks, parchments hold the
Figures & laws of scribbling action, all
For rational murderous factions.

*

Descendant decay,
Shadows of yesterday
Wunderlust, forlorn and dulled,
Sold cold, a spirit betrayed and culled.
Regurgitation, a past fickle fascination
Public masturbation.
A New Deal,
Big deal,
Fates revolving pillory wheel.
Repeat it on the radio
The westward unsheathed sword of dusk
In this our atlas of woe.

*

Oh, how that future was stolen by those unspoilt
Clammy hands. Far off loud & hungry born from
Baby’s booming lands.
They dammed the river Excelsior,
They built on shifting sands.
In multitudinous swarms like bees
Using words like these:
Of “defiance, justice, peace & change”;
Their children they only did estrange.
They gave peace a chance & profit in it,
Overcame all selfish limits.
I forever shall curse that womb
That made our world a diseased tomb.
Like swarms of bees afraid to sting,
They pull the bells their overseers did ring.
Impotent, old, passive & fat
They horde the rich new honey stored vat.
That sweetest milk of discord, they hold
& covet the corked gourd,
Old mighty social cataclysms,
Became rapacious breeding mental prysms.
For those born out of their freedom
We hold only this dying kingdom.

This poem is Copyright ยฉ incognito_bombastus