Yesterday’s Philosophies Are The Juntas Of Today

Yesterday’s philosophies are the juntas of today.
Here comes a man who wants to lay down the law
like the Burgess Shales. You can smell him with your eyes.
You can taste the machine-guns in his psychotic heart
waking up with the birds in the dawn
like a turkey vulture waking up with a bad cough
to kill another schoolhouse full of kids
learning C stands for coffins, to prove
parasites can be every bit as murderous
as predators in the killing fields of recess.
There’s an ideological maggot in his brain
and masses of worms in his heart. He wants
a better future for flies and if he can’t get it
by rigging an election, he’ll spread it
like the hydrophobic infection of a rabid dog.

Overwhelmed, shell-shocked into indifference
as if you were sleep-shopping among bombs
in a walking coma, as if you’d lost your fig-leaf
of protective innocence and your outrage
were flatlining, having found a way to hide
and disguise yourself like the living under
the dismembered corpses of the dead. You
ever watch a kid learning to tie its shoes
if it’s got any, and remember not so long ago
that was you, before you entered this abattoir
of razorblades that cut your eyelids off
with new ideas as if you’d just come of age?

Real flesh and blood, eyes, ears, noses,
fingertips and tresses of scorched hair wrinkled
like the filaments of lightbulbs that have burnt out,
brutalized by the occluded second-guesses
of the demonic abstractions that take possession
of the human heart and drain it like a tit for hungry ghosts.

Look at the daylilies in their death shrouds
withered by famine because of the toxic death
of millions of bees in the honey-pots of the wildflowers
who couldn’t adapt to the neonicotinoids
of the counter-evolution of Frankensteinian industrial research
wrecking sex for the birds and the bees.

I’m a reasonably safe Canadian who’s hoarse
from screaming murder like a higher education
with a free medical programme in the iambs
of Greek prosody that limp across the stage
to stand out from the chorus like a critical investigation
into the interrogative nature of tragedy
when it happens to somebody else. I’ve worn
blood-caked armchairs out trying to come to terms
with all the atrocities I’ve been left out of by luck
as if I should have been on that plane
with the rest of the world so I know what
I’m talking about when I say I can feel
the pity that purges the play so much easier
than I can what it’s like to identify a child
in the wreckage by the shoes they were wearing
before they had their legs torn off like dolls
in a vendetta of cordite and political voodoo.

I’ve been a bilious witness in the slaughterhouse
of the mad monkeys with a genius for hate
that makes even the unutterable silence feel ashamed
of being one of them by genetic acclamation
whatever you say about the inoffensiveness
of my immunized humanitarianism trying
to keep the snakepit at bay like a lapwing
that really hasn’t got much of a future left
to distract it from like the fledgling afterbirth of tomorrow.

Everybody bares their fangs like the moon
to defend the foundation stones of plack
the molars of their society were established on
like the alphabet blocks of their rights and constitutions
set up like a great barrier reef of checks and balances
to govern the big fish from eating all the little ones
until recently. The atavistic wolf nature
of the corporate blue whales has gone insane
killing the krill, that’s us, they live upon.
They’re eating the foodchain like the afterbirth
of a miscarriage of their own genetically modified appetites.

Thirty years of lean cows for every pharaonic year
of fat ones. Even the moon’s taken off
too much weight. There’s no wine goblet
in my brother’s saddlebags worth stealing anymore.
A business reputation for fair dealing
is the defamation of the character of a maggot
that knows better than most corporations do
when enough is enough. And worming their way
into the rest like the basic elements of life
is just institutional pleonaxia that will eat itself to death.