And there's an unnerving sense that life
is flying by, the trapeze is swinging just within my grasp, and
I must grasp it and soar over the chasm or miss the chance to
do something with my life.
I'm still struggling, though I hate that word, with the terrible sense
that the toxic leaders of faith are in a Holy War of an utterly tortured
loss of decency,
And the detritus which surrounds me, like the papers
and mummified bandages of lost opportunities for Americans
to recover being good citizens in the world
- - - Slip into quicksands from shrouds of illness.
We're swimming with Christian decency! We're drowning - -
We're suffocating in sands and our throats rattle with
The coarse gravel of our righteousness
From the last cloak of simple decency.
Do you remember a time when there was enough nature in the city
to hear crickets and katydids? Those times are absent in the city where I live.
I feel as if the President is a swollen, grotesquely drugged Christian Alice in
a mad party of venomous, warlike tea. And there exists this strange and
even eerie relationship, as if we are tiny mites waltzing capriciously
on the edge of a giant teacup,
all the while below is a swirling chasm of toxic gook,
churning at the base of the cup, and it's the world.
Dancing on its edge, mightily imagining that all is well when the layers of hell
shimmer metallic, ghostly winds about us, and throughout the miracle of
dawn and repeated daylight, the skirmish continues unending, howling, never abating.
Jesus
When winds and hotheaded breezes of evil continue their
bluster of over-the-top seriousness, and gusts of trumpets and
announcements pass like sulfurous gas through Chaos' Kitchen,
We tap dance and shuffle-shoe and hop-skip-and-jump on the porcelain edge,
Mighty mites that we are, whilst all around us persistent jumping fleas
and scooter bugs and itty-bitty-gnats of human folly
Fall to their depths in the poisonous sludge below.
Christ
All around the saucer newscasters and radio announcers and media moguls
blast the events of our minuscule insects as we fall into the saucer, drowning.
Mother Mary
Above in space the military mites and proud patriotic pentagon flies and mosquitoes
Send death jets and Destructo Rays and buzzing copters and bombers
and awe-and-destruction vehicles careening though the atmosphere,
Screaming mindless flea-bitten speeches about free democracy and liberty while our soldiers
torture more middle-eastern bugs below. They're only Iraqis. And soon
the proud American bugs covered in red-white and blue look indistinguishable
from the Iraqi bugs as the Americans suck the blood and feed and feast and
devour the terrorist bugs, sucking, drinking their drunken grins in our tortured prisons,
And Ashcroft is falling from the radioactive skies
Soon there is no distinguishing between the two,
as covered in blood and grime and suck juices the bugs begin to look alike.
In spaces surrounding us, the ferocious battle of
The Very Self-Important Insects Stumbling
on the Lip of a Giant Worldly Tea Cup continues . . . . but it didn't begin recently.
Oh Immortal God from Whom this World Began
It only recently became ever more muddy, for decades had passed while NASA
and the space program squandered billions of dollars into blackness accomplishing predominantly nothing while Challenger and Discovery satellites blew up
Exploded in midair, returning to Earth, or departing from the sullen warlike ground
from which our astronaut heroes came,
{{{because of faulty heat tiles and flea-bitten planning}}}
Hear that sound?
No, it isn't the National Anthem
It is the whirling of tiny flea wings.
Praise the Fleas!
Praise the President!
Praise Satan!
Anyway, it would be just a teensy bit surreal were it not
Already
so close to the heart of gushing bloodied truth
here in the mighty land of the fleas.
I am Jumping, Jumping, Jerking, Twitching
with great Joy
(Copyright 2004 by Darius Gottlieb. No reproduction without express permission from the author)
You're invited to visit Darius' website for more of his photographs and his music at Art Bliss