A white hand on a black arm
Reaches forth as if to grasp
With brilliant fingers outstretched.
Nothing is attained:
No reward for patience,
No sum of currency,
No fruit of tree or vine.
Just a dull satisfaction
Worn away by years
Of shaving one's face with it.

All of this could be held
As irrelevant
(Or held to one's throat).
Truth hurts more than lies
And cliches sound better
Before they're written down.
This is the way things must be.
Since there is no advance made
By bickering tirelessly to a corpse,
I will rest my case for now,
And sulk in solitude.
There I will cry like a mountain.

In my feeble abode,
I will study flaccid masterworks
And contemplate fallacy.
Upon rising the next day,
The sun will explode the sky
Into a canvas of painful colors
And boring shadows.
After sixteen cups of coffee
And an armload of lotion,
Consciousness will stagger dismally,
Seeking asylum from wretched insinuations.
God and Satan will simultaneously gasp,
Overcome by the sheer mass of human stupidity
And brilliance.

A few plastic-hearted bobble-head dolls
Will wave American flags
And wear sleeves to cover the puncture wounds.
It's anybody's guess what they're looking for.
It's everybody's guess, I should say.
Not that it will matter much
In a week
Or two,
Given the fickle nature of Good Taste,
The mother of all great lies
And keeper of obscenity.

Good Taste likes to give her babies Ritalin.
Her babies will one day fill crystalline coffins
Along a placid shore,
A shore which catches all lost souls
Unclaimed by the bureaucracy which
Plucked them from the air
Like dead doves and left them
To rot on the floors of the orchards
Which once symbolized their only hope.
Somewhere, a frail man sits in a wheelchair.

Five and a half decades subsequent
To the somewhat colorful vexation of youth
Brought about in various hues
By the inability to accept one's faults
And channel them into a more constructive livelihood,
A green plastic soldier stands on a beach.
Normandy, I guess.
The ships must have left him.

He crinkles his nose up
At the sixty watt bulb of the sun
And remarks dryly,
"It used to seem so much brighter."
He's British.

Beneath him there are two very large stones,
One of which is speaking:
"Halt! Let all who would go here
Be assured that my comrade is most extremely sincere."
The other stone belts, "You're a liar!"
And ashes caress the gentle slope
Of the shore, which helps
To keep the urine of the sea
From reaching the houses at the top,
But rather drained into the hovels
At the bottom.

A shot rings out through the pines, and
Democracy clenches at a fleeting breath.
Two houses sit on opposite sides of a road
That leads from London to Washington,
Where a third house sits
Like bones bleaching in the sun.
A man in a top hat makes the signal
To increase power to the great machine
That looms ominously above the threshold
Of a well-groomed society
That sings off key.

The cogs of the machine grind against each other,
Struggling for rank as the apparatus presses forward
Upon the civilization that crafted it.
Smoke billows from its monstrous lungs;
Its teeth are like icicles.

Civilization bellows forth a screech
The likes of which have never before
Been vocalized.
A giant hand clasps
Around Civilization's scarred
And bruised wrist,
Dragging him down
Deep into a
Perilous
Cavern
Devoid of
Light and sound.
Civilization's bastard daughter, Culture,
Cries at the loss of her father,
A treacherous deadbeat
With icepick thorns and razorwire lips.

Fascists and communists
Rise phoenix-like from Civilization's ashes,
Blazing with peacock plumes
Of fiery misdirection.
Idiots genuflect to them reverently,
Praying for foolish outcomes.
The word "sex" displaces
The word "humanity."
Innocent people smolder.
Kindness dissipates.
I awaken.

I have been dreaming
For several feverish nights.
In my heart rests my confidence,
And in my arms
Rests my gun,
Which was obtained on a sullen day.

Forgive me for such things,
Which I relate to you reluctantly;
But on a darkened day,
Such things were far more subject to interpretation.
The light that I reflected upon them at the time
Yet goes by the name Isabelle,
And her glory may never be trod upon.

However in this waning hour,
My mind slips carelessly from about the Prize
Which once I named in ink across a papyrus ocean,
And the yellow film of nostalgia
Pollutes my very being
That I might no more convey to you
The lays of a democracy
Murdered in cold blood.