The funeral of innocence

Every word is a coffin.

We usher silence into soil

with a eulogising tongue, 

all memory commemorative 

in ghostly recollection

of pre-verbal innocence.

Obelisks taper skywards, 

the earth's stone roots 

combing the cemetery air

to sustain dead branches

bursting in the dark, unseen,

in a world inverted by grief. 

Savage

"Behave yourself. You should gratefully yield 

to the civilising influence of your superiors. 

You are a field to be enclosed and cultivated, 

a garden to be brought into bloom, a bower, 

a boudoir, a vessel to fill, not a wilderness."

"No, I am a wilderness. I will tolerate you 

to the extent you observe the same terms as me

as we both pass through a world that is not ours, 

and I will yield nothing further. I am a savage."

The idiot club

People kept forming clubs

and we wanted to discourage this.

People should be atoms, drones, 

mindless, not social and active, 

should obey, not think and participate,

so we started an idiot club,

with rules only an idiot would follow,

to see if enthusiasm for joining clubs

would blind them to what membership requires. 

The people joined in their droves. 

One rule was to persecute non-members, 

and those who didn't follow all the rules.

Another was to constantly change the rules,

and to ensure they contradicted each other.

The rules were deliberately insane,   

and the more insane the rules, 

the more keenly they were enforced, 

because their very insanity meant 

the only way to prove you were a member 

was by enforcing them.

Before long everything was in ruins. 

Everything any club had achieved

had been destroyed. With nothing left to do

and all appetite for clubs finally expunged, 

the people meekly submitted to our control.

Sad song

I've always liked sad songs.

Have I been mourning so long?

I don't remember feeling any other way. 

Perhaps I miss the boy that left,

the boy I've pretended to be ever since,

lost between the faces of a double life,

seeking in the maze a self I've been denied, 

the mirrors lining the hall with lies I tell 

to survive this carnival. Is that why?

Is that why I've always liked sad songs?

Exile

There is no city

that can exile me. 

I am a citizen of the wilderness. 

I may walk among you, 

but I am not one of you. 

I have always been an outcast. 

That was your decision, not mine, 

long ago. You don't recall making it. 

There's much you don't understand. 

The worst punishment you can imagine 

for me now is no worse

than the place I just came from. 

Your laws are hollow threats, 

your assembly of elders as subtle

as a prowling lynch mob. 

I exile you. I condemn you: to ignorance

of your own mediocrity, to know only

your own opinion of yourselves. 

Build a wall around your exile

and insist that it encloses a city.

It will always be a garden of fools. 

I surrender myself to a higher court, 

and accept its unpredictable verdict 

in an indifferent wasteland. 

I would rather be nothing there

than less than nothing 

here with you. 

Pearl

We dance compulsively, with balletic precision. 

We pirouette upon the thin ice, unaware 

of the bottomless reservoirs of evil beneath.

When, from time to time, we pass a face, 

gaunt, glazed over eyes gazing up from under, 

expression frozen, a mask of horror and despair

preserving a last moment of realisation, 

we dance over it and on to our next arabesque.

Sometimes we pause, perhaps, to reflect, 

briefly, just as long as decency dictates,  

and ponder our superficial, irrelevant thoughts,

wisdom some might call it, but we must continue, 

movement is essential. We mustn't rest our weight 

too long in one place. The ice might break. We dance,

until we don't, until we fall in, into the inky sin, 

and swim in ice water, acid vice, breathe in the brine,

fill up our burning brimstone lungs, until our skin

is just a thin membrane between the dark within

and a fluid amniotic evil that surrounds us, 

a midnight sea, biological without being moral, 

a confluence of every lustful discharge in the shadows,

where we dive for the black pearl of our conception.

How many masks pressed up against the ice

does it take to warn the other dancers not to stop.

Don't risk this knowledge, lineage as carnage, 

the dark cousinage that condemns us, 

implicated by ancestors we share 

with all the murderers and rapists, 

touched by all the evil in the world

clotting in our veins when we are dead.