....From The Tree Of......................The Ranting Critic
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_______________________________________________________ On The Beach 3/17/03 It's time to either throw arms wide, wait to receive the wounded, bury the dead, let salty tears cleanse bitter ground and raise each white-toothed howl to scald the clouds with anger so profound it leaves us reeling or to hide away. Harbor every safety prop blankets, thumbs, alcohol and chocolate, turn the calendar pages, whipping past what's coming up. Hoping for late summer, maybe then it'll all be over. We'll pretend it didn't happen, wasn't our country, anyway; what's a few less filthy bedouins, after all. And if I hear that, I promise you, I'll shake each broken child's body outside your door; drip the lintel with their blood and say- In Herod's day, it only came to male children to pay for the sins of the fathers. We are equally disemboweling little girls- their goats and grannies and the schoolteachers and doctors, herders, seeresses of the desert who saw it coming. Took their poison in a quiet way, will turn to smoke and go inside the ears of your soldier sons who may go mad, may slaughter more one day; we are making soulless killers of generations; there'll be hell to pay and nothing for the ransom. If we wave the flag and fire the rockets it's like Prince Prospero's party in the Masque of the Red Death- we're living Poe while telling ourselves it's John Philip Sousa we hear above the cheers for our ........grave President. Does no one hear the Kyrie at all? Room Seems to me when a person says no he means it; there are no gray areas. This is no fifteen year old cocktease in the back seat of a Buick, but a grown, 'I know my mind, goddammit', person who wants for whatever reason -doesn't need to give one, wants an acre or two inviolate, some independent ground where he can hear himself think without the stink of a knot of puppies piddling, licking him in needy-assed devotion getting between the thoughts and bone, the place there shouldn't be any space at all; the mind can lay against the white and feel how cold, how hard, how jealous mean the truth is, wanting only the man and walls to corral the horse stampede of his past as it hurls at him in words that write most all the wrongs he's seen and some he's done. This is no Merton- talking with his god, oh no it's Kong and he needs room enough to span the city blocks and even meadows and the secret childhood hollers- one earthshook step at a time. To See How Small You Are Some people creep around the rear, circling and doubling back, so I never get to see them full, right on, to ask them where they've been. Lord knows, they'd never tell me. Life is full of secrets. Sometimes the only way I know they've left is when I discover parts of them that pop up somewhere I thought would be unlikely, but it isn't really, considering how they always loved the ninja style of getting things done; so that months from now, it wouldn't be as obvious they'd given away the thing that I loved best while it was still wet and being born. They'd whisked it away, not offering it to me, who'd loved it best- (the one supposedly most loved), and given it to those who could give it gloss. I must remember just how small I am and not to love these things too much, or at least to never say so- this is all my fault, you see it always is. Easy Nothing is a cheaper attention-getter than a diaphanous, half-clad woman; especially, if she looks young. Easiest thing in the world to make a thing look artsy; fool anyone into thinking that they've landed in a pool of buttered estrogen and class - particularly if her ass is not obscenely cracked but teases in its roundness, gauzy floaters of chiffon caressing buttock one and buttock two with room enough for credits in the teeniest, most delicate of fonts the names of those who believe they're somehow part of the 'fold', that they've arrived along with the lesbians who put those things together. I'll tell you this: No one who would let themselves be part of it will ever get another nod from me. It's just plain embarrassing. Bliss There was a time, long long ago it seems to me now when I was blissfully ignorant of what could truly hurt me. If there was only a backward clock and I could take my index finger, trail some counter clockwise circles, enough to take me back to the day before we met, I'd do it; cancer may be a character building experience, if you're lucky enough to come out the other end, but I don't know one person who wouldn't have passed it up. Maybe, Fry It Up With Onions Read there's some stink about stealing the brain of a radical German frau, social fringe nut from the seventies. Suicide- hung in her cell. I think what the hell- there's nothing they'll find gonna tell how that bitch thought about anything now: why the bombings, the killings were needed. There's only gray rubbery-ness stuck in a jar that's called out some sensitive, right-to-life, everything's sacred old sore butts who want to preserve all the dignity terrorists and dogshit like Meinhof must be afforded. I say, if it's edible fry and be done. Mismatch Ever notice how the porcelained, the clear-eyed ones the girlscouted, pouty-lipped soft-chested chatelaine's-by-nature will find themselves, at twenty, dancing in the arms of the scaly-skinned, thin-lipped pig-eyed, puff-chested charlatans who marry them their scabby peckers finding it such fun to pop those cherries, have a whirl at younger girls, till this one has a child or two behind her?
Then go sneaking off
All around, synthetic motives
I want to know the truth
I even grow
This one-third of the Godhead
The fact that the Omnipotent
If HE is there,
If I had been a father,
Usually, a squeaky |
