Munch

edvard

Fahrenheit mid twenties 

on doleskint Saturdays 

bordered in black and white

diamond linoleum.

Religion is peace

peace is boredom,  

and boredom is just

another twenty years

of life to tear off

or wear as a uniform.

  

I sourly observe the 

English countryside

on a coffee table 

pamphlet. My 

mind un-bridles 

in those munching 

country lanes. 

But sometimes it's

Lost, like old people 

who gawp insensate

coiled in the turmoil

of their punctured past.

Scoured of desire. And

wracked in the recknynge 

of their tossed summers.

I wandered like a 

lonely betting slip. 

Cold and alone in 

the loverless sunshine 

that fixed it's spots 

around me like coins of light.

Silence invaded the suburbs

and scarcely discernible saints 

wandered beatific through 

irreligious streets. 

Spliced and spat from the core

of some bland fungible fruit. 

Violence and narcotics and post football pugnacity 

all they is a bank balance and lovebites in a taxi.  

But from the high windows 

only the hospital sanitizes 

a portion of the view

a lucid tale of an old egalitarian ideal

when man used to command care.

The rest is the mere wires, veins and tarmac, 

of spaghetti land.

In the distance tall glass and sheets 

of metal and the corporate graffiti of slogans.  

Now that lyrics, orchestra's and bards live on in microchips.

Below lies the shanty of

Blitzkrieged cardboard land

our cratered urban quagmire

that ripples and pulses in the 

glassy updraught of 

punishing green house heat.

The tar sweats and the 

weary river rolls on with a 

sickly petroleum veneer. 

Munch paints our evening canvass

his July mind beats and fashions  

a tubercular sky with the

scores and strokes of 

wire brushes lacquered in acid.

Munch paints our evening sky.

with eyes hot wild and malignant. 

Torrid visions of 

a thirsty world

dripping in paint

in all tones of love and pain

in the blurred traffic

of colours and crisis.

Can you see suicide?

Violence and narcotics and post football pugnacity

all we need is a bank balance and love bites in a taxi.

The slow odious descent   

for a climax we'll regret

ring by subterranean ring

we slip, through the

carnal labyrinth. 

To drugs in cubicles

to horrors and desires

to phantoms of lust and

ultimate visions of kunt

toast a generation tongued

to the last gyzyms of it's consciousness

and the irises of youth are wreathed 

in frenzies of blossom and the

patriotic crowds of jostling flowers 

with faces of love, evil and beauty.

Though we are the maimed fledglings 

of unremedied sorrows that fester in silence

of love that split and drizzled in violent deserts.

Men are units pressed and bullied into shape

generation X, evil and atomized. 

A calculated race that orbits insensate

though shifts of routine.

The mass grapple for distinction

the elite consolidate their position

the wizened old prune of commerce

licks at the seeds still stuck in her teeth. 

And all the heroes go insane.

In a doller-s**t economy.

Cogito ergo sum in quadrophenia 

the suns blood red colours bruised

into yon entrails of thy labouring cloud

purple and gold contusions and

shreds of ribbon trace the zenith

where aeroplanes chalk the sky.

Its not puerile premature pathos 

over a pash that puffed and burst 

into flakes of impalable ash.

I stand windswept where the waves

crash into the chalk cliffs

smeared tip of white

at the end of the lands nose

the travelling waves welter 

the forgetful surf creams on those edges

my tears taste vicious at that

briny edge, at that

vast edge drear.

Author's Note

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