Thursday, July 27, 2006

Harsh and Helmet Men

[Having talked so much about poetry yesterday, here is a piece my unemployed angel attributes to the unknown poet from the Third Galaxy. Otherwise one might think I had written in one afternoon back in 1980.

You’d have to be stark raving mad to think that it has anything to do with what is happening, or might happen in our world! Just for the sake of conjecture, if you did see that had some relation to what is happing in our world, such insight could quite easily drive you stark, raving mad. ]



Come all you harsh and helmet men and listen while I sing.
My subject is the ugliness your sick delights can bring:
The chewing worms, the flame that burns in fear and groaning nights.
I sing these things with great disgust because I know they're right!

I know about the things I shout - I've seen them all before,
behind the panes of broken glass and the rot beneath the floor!
Once there was a people who did the things you do,
a “Nation-Under-God”, and a “Citadel-of Truth”!

They thought they had a cause of sorts before they started out.
Their heads were full of the shining words that leaders bleed to shout.
But when they see the shattered brains and the juicy, steaming eyes,
they know, somehow, that what they've done was just another crime!

True, most of them were angry when they heard the orders come:
They stood and swore they nevermore would ever carry guns.
But time and chance and circumstance fell upon them all
and off they went, a march of men, as lemmings to the fall.

Perhaps it serves no real use to name the wicked curse
Of a will that chills and thrills to kill and fill an empty purse
with gobs and weeds and crooked sleeves and put it in a hearse.
But if I bite my tongue, I think I only make it worse!

Life is hard to live and you must see what people do:
the way they murder, scream and flout in awful public view
the murders of the urchin waifs and the drownings in the blue
of their fleeing kin and Rin-Tin-Tin as he chews on your neighbor’s foot...

The camera lens now pans and zooms upon the Sacred Woods,
reveals the Naked Mysteries of strangulated roots...
And as I bend to twist again that dislocated switch,
I wonder if I really am responsible for some of this:

[voice over: well modulated voices of tee-vee speakers are now heard]

“Rich men, pigs, and poverties are dining hungrily!...”
“The table groans as dogs chew bones and fried atrocities
are served to the sound of smacking lips, while on the glowing screen
a naked dancer is slowly stripped...” O, MY GOD, COMFORT ME!!!

A robber and a thief is just exactly what I am!
The deeds I've done have left me in this dirty garbage can!
But when I see eternity, I open up my hands!
I bleed for help! Eternally I am a lonely man!”

Some will pray to Jesus and some to nameless gods!
Some will say to the thunder storm, “Please, strike our lightning-rods!”
I don't have so much to say just one, simple plea!
If you get out of here alive, please remember me!”

(if you get out of here alive, please remember me...)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahhh, dear cousin, once again you have gone off the deep end and brought ridicule to a people who must survive as predators only can. Should we continue to exploit those, who exploit us....Do we dare speak out, as Fascism consumes us as the guise of democracy.. You betcha... history has to have something to show we are not all lemmings.
Nuke Watcher / Baltimore,Maryland

Chuck Cliff said...

Thank you, cousin, for throwing a couple of words my way.

It gets lonely out here in cyberspace, but I've been a street singer in earlier incarnations, so I've learned, "never look in the kitty while you're singing".

The litmus test for fascism is eliminationism. The right wing is full of rhetoric, but the acutaliztion of their threats has not, generally, occured.

Orcinus,http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/ has documented this phenomenon extremely well.



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