Humanus --
ανθρωπ ότητα

"One can always be kind to people about
whom one cares nothing." - Oscar Wilde

In the palm of our hands maps grow, cities
drive their steel rods deeper into the land.

That’s the way modern times began.

Some one draws an airplane on the ceiling.
It growls across the horizon until steel breaks
steel and fire consumes blaze and the melting
rivers run ran steam to the victims of that often
repeated word “terror” – Spread the blankets
to carry the extra dead. Empty body bags
are full. Graves Registration has nothing left.

None are left to stack body parts intact,
save intestine, hand or the other parts
we discard to make one eye right
and another wrong. There is no sex here.

No one screams in the night for power.

Speculators remember how it could have been,
but they lost. In this basement near the furnace
nothing remains to keep records of last moment
of final war when Terra implodes and we dissolve,
rise to inert gas, lift to the temperature of balefire
spit from the back door of the every day sun.

We are lost and nothing we exchange
will make our entry and exit simpler.

Shall we fade away and cast nets for more
life to endure what all extinct species recollect
when their bones are cast as dice for chance.

Soft body parts disassociate and the range
of vibrant, advanced morphology tamed
to press salt marsh for last stragglers, dead
or alive. No one know how scorched the sun
will burn to crumble and melt many roads to Rome,
Byzantium --and on ship to the New Amsterdam,
we bellow delicate songs with lost notation.

Mercy crumbles like rich brick and we pass
through every emotion imagined by logic --
By accident the TV’s turned on to imaginary spool
of comic friends playing parlor games in the nude.

What’s left has no significance. No one can read.
We are blind, deaf and forty times zero is immaterial;
space laps the planks of gray ghost schooner ten days
lost with all hands off Cape Horn. Every soul bound
in canvas with one last stitch drawn through nose.

 

3-22-06