The fingerprint

Osip sang of his Kremlin man, his mountaineer
with a thick poking finger pointing the way ahead
for his menagerie of sycophantic porters. He wasn't alone.
All the world's capitals boast their climbers now,
wherever a flag can be flown in hate to claim a state,
and from the pinnacles of their mighty achievements,
from mountaintops remote and inaccessible to lesser men,
they seek to join hands with each other over our heads
as if holding a seance in which we are the spirits of the dead,
the anonymous ghosts of their future victims,
summoned and interrogated by democratic rituals
which they tell us are evidence of our consent,
then, having served our purpose, we are dismissed
to occupy the graves they have prepared for us
in accordance with the will of the people.

They reach out towards each other urgently,
strenuously exert themselves, stretch,
willing their fingertips on beyond physical limits,
each standing on tip-toe on the separate summit
of their individual boasts, their own conquests,
their unique struggles, their profound insights,
their paths to glory, their rags to riches tales,
all now aching to touch so badly, and join hands
and form their criminal club of vindicated outcasts
and misunderstood tyranny, invoking secret magic
as they extend their arms so far towards each other,
that their straining hands summon strange blossoms
emerging weirdly from beneath the ground, far below,
attracted by the broad magnetic palms of those mighty hands,
stems twisting and pushing up through the soil of the plain,
blossoms trailing smoky stems, tipped with smooth metal buds,
launched thrusting up towards the sky, piercing the sky,
pushing on towards to the stars,
and bringing all the stars back to earth with them when they fall.

And then I see they are not the only ones, these mountaineers:
the mountains they have ascended are themselves made of men,
not rock, their piled limbs greased and gleaming with sweat
as they struggle, climbing over each other to reach the top,
writhing like time lapse insects, or atoms in slow motion,
indistinguishable from each other
in the Brownian motion of their politics,
taking turns to establish themselves in temporary prominence,
occasional Pierrots in a carnival of constant overthrow,
while truth remains a beggar on the courthouse steps,

and the foaming crop of flowers carpeting the plain below
is suddenly formed now from a sea of strange bulbs of light.
The plain is frothing with little bubbles, rising, swelling,
then suddenly bulging like balloons inflating with blinding light,
bright bulging bitter fruit erupting and bursting open
on the branches of trees tossed and teased from tiny subatomic seeds
cultivated in a lab somewhere by tame toiling boffins,
buffoons hothoused in some sterile academic ego factory
insulated from each and every moral compass and consequence.

They do to humans what Pavlov wouldn't do to a dog,
performing tiny test tube apocalypses to a captive audience
that oscillates between rigid electrified attention
and slouching in exhausted and indifferent amnesia
at the flick of a Milgram switch, secretly installed
in every miraculous, mesmeric handheld device they carry
to mediate, filter and attenuate their ration of cruel reality
with an illusion of benign rationality
that makes it bearable to the infantilised mob
and facilitate the silent automated applause
of a thousand strangers' thumb-jerk response
once the final performance is unveiled
and we are our brother's keeper
only in the sense
Zimbardo meant in Stanford Prison,
only in the sense
that we are all just preened and painted comfort women
draped as decorative and distracting embellishments
on the arms of disposable cannon fodder men
marching until it is as if they never existed,
only in the condemned and uncommon sense
that makes no sense and makes everyone wrong,
and there is nothing worth fighting for anymore.

And then I see it is not love that moves these mountaineers,
not love that compels them to reach for each other
as the ripe bright blooms of light on stems of dust rise
from soil rich with our own powdered and anonymous bones:
the mountaineers reach towards each other across this wide world
not to join hands or embrace, but to take each other by the throat
and as they extend their hands they reap their crop of hate,
their stroboscopic harvest, their uranium bouquet,
and woo each other with a darkening romance
recited on tongues of ash among the fallout.

But neither is their hate sincere
for they know nothing about each other.
They ascend interior peaks on which no suns rise,
in a primordial solitude of fear and guilt and transformation,
a private Shasta and Kailash and Schiehallion in the mountains
that range secretly along the ridges of the secretions
in their own fingerprint
where with lonely heroic struggle they overcome doubt,
shut traumas that stunted their development away in caves,
defeat fantasy demons instead,
and find the severe conviction necessary
to usher into this world their internal night,
their verklärte nacht, and at last
the hands unjoin, the outstretched arms fall,
the fingers descend on the button
and imprint upon it the map of their derangement
with residues of endocrine secretion,
and the missiles are launched
and the fingerprint remains on the button,
for a few minutes at least,
standing as brief testimony of an individual presence
before it evaporates in the white anonymising heat
of an artificial sun.