Lake of Fear

(Lacus Timoris)

Convections of disaster lift the smoke from ashen pyres;
Dust falls out of the clouds, scatters the pulverised earth.

If I had a pen to write; if I had keys to type my words,
Keys to play on, keys in which to sing, keys to lock away
The kind of truth that approximates itself, accumulates
In neglected drifts for none to recognise;

If I had a pen now after all the pens I owned before
Had cracked and burst, inking sense away, bleeding
Black and blue across these pages, my wasted pages.

If I had a pen or key I should rearrange every word
I ever wrote; but, no, they are all redacted circumstance;
Nothing is demonstrable and, if it were, it would still be twisted;
Its truth stripped away until there is nothing.

And we are drowning in fluidity. Freedom slides like slip
Through the fingers, a thin mud that holds no shape;
Bloodied fingers claw the dirt for solid ground and in bedrock,
Take what stone is there for wisdom, in desperation build it
Into rickety piles to house our brittle and hapless bones.

Leaves on the trees turn red and fall like blood;
Through bare branches, the sun sets lynched and garish
Or rises like a blinding airburst to obliterate us all.

Every place is hollow, ravaged by strife or ordnance,
Every place destroyed, cavernous: the world is void.
All lost souls know, who does not cower cracks a whip.
Who is not with is against. We are spittle now
Of our own black venom.

Warfare runs in the veins, runs sanguine in the streets.
The walking wounded flee and there is no shelter.

Men and women take refuge in the heat of the day
Or in the habits of lives unravelling. The old honour is gone,
Withered to a rag, hopelessly persisting.

Take the child bride, betrothed when her home was rubble and dirt,
When goodness turned to cinders; she preserves the illusion,
After hell broke loose, sold into wedlock for someone else’s shame.

And the boy-soldier, conscripted, press-ganged, horror shines
In his eyes at crimes he did not commit but will be made to soon.
His beloved ghosts flicker in sideways vision, insidiously dead,
Forever gnashing their revenge. He holds his weapon tight.
If tears are ever to flow on his cheeks again he must fire it
To kill all memory and the world besides.

There are some, my friend,
Who hide conceit behind a fan of privilege.
I would force them to stare down the barrel of that child’s gun
Force them to kneel in submission, take vows in a parody of love.
I would sell them as cheap as all the cheapened corpses
Laid in the sodden ground by their pursuit of power.

I would show them fear under the burning sky, the clenched fist
Of desperate measures translated into flesh. I would
Hold their smug faces to the rot their decisions left behind,
The decay of policy and procedure and necessity and all that guff
When what putrefies is the by-catch of ideology and the bottom line,
Sins of self and selfishness, greed and gutlessness.

I would show them fear;
I would make them like me:
Withered, remorseful and afraid.

© BH, 2017

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I feel like I’ve been serialising a longer poem (as yet nameless) for some time now. It’s various parts may not be self-evident because I’m not sure the whole piece is finished. This is yet another segment. 

I’ll keep schtumm for now. You can, of course, poke about here and see if the bits can be made out.

More later…