Sorry

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13366779

LEARNER full text (2024)

PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13381922

APPRENTI texte integral (2024)

Le monde paisible ou la mort

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
Poems, mine and theirs

Sorry

From above my dungeon of internal exile,
Instead of the lute-song  of a long-lost liberator,
A little bird sang to me : 
“They have been properly thanked for handing you your fate.”

Then it sang: “Defeat, defeat, alas!”

Condemned to Tito justice:

Punish victim and aggressor alike.

Both condemned to the same silence.

Except my text is new and vital now;

Theirs, another duplicate of nothing new. 

The interdict we share is their victory.

Sore losers triumph once more.

Hard crafted advice lovingly tendered

Cast aside like garbage,

Decades of work brought to nothing

By biased gatekeepers of idle swells.

As usual,

Progress gets stale crumbs at best

While reaction licks the icing all around

Until it vomits the fruit of its gluttony.

How nice to watch things shrink in the rear-view!

Republicans, “moderates”, “progressives”: herd wannabees.

Set sail for stronger, more predictable winds,

Not their doldrums and squalls without letup.

To we survivors of everything up to now, cheers!

Of all people, we should  heed conservation of energy laws,

Hate, fear and pain without letup, inexcusable waste,

The whole world could burn down and never satisfy.

You can make a brick fly if you power it up enough.

But never like a glider. What a heresy to suggest as much!

A brick’s powerplant would rupture the glider’s belly,

Though it could soar without that priority.

Despite my faults, my bias, my frustrate ego;

My hatred of the numb, of having to make them heed and act;

My distrust of deeply held beliefs;

I still retain one certainty. 

Not through all eternity, come Hell or high water,

Regardless of hope and outcome, fear and hurt,

No-one other than poor, crippled souls, crushed as kids,

Enjoys the shoddy melodrama of evil for pleasure and profit.

Berserker graduates of the Sorbonne, the Ivy League, Capital Universities;

Taught to feed on the poor, on the truth and on Nature;

Too caught up in crimson carpet, tape, blood and ink for any real mastery;

Adrift down the red  meander of the Reich renewed every thousand years.

Hosing down a barking dog, that’s not genocide. 

Our ruffled feathers are not worth the tears of one pietà.

Astride the hierarchy of evil, we cannot throttle it down 

As the PeaceWorld Learner Agora could.

Any sin this sensate hamburger must claim,

Pales against monstrous elder aggressions.

Whatever my faults, 

Microbes to whales.

World War COVID casualties deliberately neglected,

Senile leaders died faster than their sacrificial underlings.

Go on and die of old age, of old ideas, of necessity, with me.

We shall see who’s memes survive, if any.

Families may blowback from malnutrition and neglect, or simple bombs

Mercenaries will rob us and go home, that’s sure,

Fat ledgers will become bitter memories of zeros googled.

Your last ditch stand on Baal basics? 

They will bury you there with your victims and all the kids.

Just before every corpse 
Rotten, smoke-stacked, drowned, mummified by radioactivity, fossilized alive
Re-emerges from the earth, the air and the water
To learn its fate from the Unnamable who’s got nothing much better to do.

We must all be reborn into our victims, too.
As well as every other stranger, animal and plant
Perhaps superior, wiser beings 
The Old Ones: Virus, mushroom and other microbes
Older by uncounted generations, compared to our young handful.
Maybe desert plains awash in flowers
As far as the eye can see, on a distant planet.
Everything alive, before and after, from beginning to end. 

You will be born into it again, and die from them over and over again.

Sorry

IN FRENCH

… 

COMMENT ? markmulligan@comcast.net