Bridging

Being Here

Being here,
George Floyd,
the suffering being,
under the knee,
under the snare of the drum
of a heart about to beat tattoo.

(Trump supporter,
whistled dog, got form
got off before, going for more,
white supremacist,
Chauvinist, Chauvin,
pressing down deliberately to kill)

Bring a grown man down to his mother's name
as, yes, in the end we all will,
all personal, the same,
the last card a mother,  lover, daughter
last breath.

Spray the mace; shoot the tear gas,
masked, your twin cheeks, masked
in the armour of your vile-pig job,
to swill, swell  around, terrorize,
take the accusation of a forged bill
to torture, and execute, medieval
on the streets under cellphone eye,
blatant as your leader says:
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and shoot someone"and not "lose
any voters"

Teflon, fireproof, slick, slack-jawed Jack,
dog of the dirty dark state that assassinates,
cuts the guts of those it lynches
nodding its pointy hats,
wants to mark the sidewalks
not the backwoods now,

its operatives, umbrella-waving
start the riots, smashing windows,

inviting looting to condemn the masses -
they know the spark to throw.

But we are all woke up; the sleepers rise
from Covid dark, the dark to know
and rise like lions, rise like lions.

.............

This - (below) when I was 15 from 1970

Empire-men

Can any benignity recall the sown rays of the sun?
Can any wisdom reset the prized-out gemstones of evening's empire?
or can any favour crop the oozy recesses of its watery grave?

Left to themselves, at worst what forlorn dreamers
seemed those who would milk an opiate from the sea's buried fields:

once star-gazing from a hooded height, housed on the high top,
hearing only the faint keening of devouring gulls,

just out of eye below an upper lip of stiff-stemmed grasses,
squabbling among crumbling cliff ledges, deeply undercut,

swept by the rage of a jumbling autumn
(soliciting sympathy with tales of lost glory),

now they float before the memory like blackened bladders
and slowly twirled driftwood of a scummed shoreline eddy,

hypocrisies foundered, revealing crab carapaces
scuttling, but stealthily out of view;

but not so far from their meat-men of a disembowelling profit,
whose shark mouths they still disguise with grotesque cosmetics
lamenting regrettable necessities,

while that razored efficiency still
ranges out in the undercover bay through blood-oiled swells,
its sleek fins signalling.