Dame Democide

Hark the b*****d soul

The elicit mourning cry of the black-wedged widow

Weathering wires for Zeus, O mighty foot

Of all contempt

Spears edge to the great, big copper heel,

The rib-cage circus, to set a human reel

Spine across the degradable kink and

The fruited curse moulds to you, the grand do--

A benign torture cry, an army of red-suited

Parliaments with heads the size of the 'Garden

The black instruments of Death to be

Warding with that human voice of yours

You fucked our wives, darling Dear, you paid the Piper--

The man with the pointed, poised nose turns to you

One finger left to point,

It points to you.

Your feather-boa chain of lies, serial deceiver

Stalin lies in wait, a benign align

For all you do, golly goo! The perfected thatched roof takes

Communism to the bureaucracy and pleads.

Don't you see, it was all a gag!

And all for tuppence, for darling Mag--

The Navy waters come onto us like sweetly spoken lovers,

In hopes of an offence, sanctity appeals to it you see

And steel-gilded torment has more affectation

Than the open waters of the pointed-nose man,

Fingers shark bait, and the stürm would be 

Most inhumane, a cruel justification.

The suited-boy with no mother and an empty brief

Comes to knock, a rap on the open field, and shudders:

The limbless lady reports there is nothing and no-one, and

He is bodied beneath the God of what it left.

Unable, uncontrolled, unmoving, always un

Done, always un

Der, the fickle filly runs coarse, dreaming 

In morse, the rat-a-tat-a-tat starts teething and the child roars

The streets, the torn filaments of the boulevards

Are not kind to it, the pride of it turns to transgression,

The waiting mother spoon feeds remnants of her meal to her child,

Eyes half intimated with the sound of still-born sorrows.

The running yield does wield, why for? The yarn comes

Spinning out like a love of modernism, I crush it like

White cement powder, aggravating the controllability

Of genocide, O work me out

Arithmetic, the nothing and the no-one 

Gives an answer of silence and solitude, the cold, hard

Shelves come dark with the dimmed glow of the church,

Up hill, down hill, the belief comes rolling up and down like a scraped penny

The bones are stoned at me, mass weight scandalised

The boy runs from the village bully, pebbled knees of gratitude

Crying mama, knee-deep in puddles caused by the seconds

We were kind enough to reign

You glare over the peak, the only meat 

In all the land, and you scrape at it, the last lamb,

Un-hungered by the distasteful orphan hermaphrodite

You robbed of the knowing that murder is seemingly malicious

The green goaded intellect comes bounding like a newspaper round,

Tided of woe, and the public shame carries itself around your neck,

A mass weight, bones stoned, and the finality? The hunted rabbit

Of your survival, red-eyed and thorn-clawed, roars like an infant. 

 

Reviews

[Damien Marty]

Can I ask the symbolism behind the orphan child with both sets of genitals?
Also, and this is simply coming from someone who just joined the site (but that may make this bit of perspective more poignant), your author's note comes off as borderline hostile, practically inviting me to find something that would offend me. On one hand it was a good hook to make me pour through every stanza at least twice, but on the other it automatically gave me some form of expectation (that was not met, whoever gets offended by this probably gets offended when a fly farts down the street) of the less-than-positive sort.

My only advisement is to honestly do away with the author's note, or chop it down to something less aggressive for the sake of not influencing how people feel about your work before they have even read it.

[Amorette Duvannes]

The hermaphrodite. Yes. That is just conclusive of every other thing I've been trying to say -- that the government takes our identities before it would take our lives. The orphan, being, obviously, a hermaphrodite, would stereotypically be what seems to the public as borderline male and borderline female, and thus without identity. And what I am trying to get at, at the end of the poem, is the question of; are we really being condemned by the government, or are our false ideas, our bullied children, our hunted -- stemming from us alone -- the real problem?

I apologise about the note -- I am disappointed that it bore false resemblance, and I have taken it away entirely so that others do not repeat the falsity. I will say, though, that there are some people on this site who do get offended when a fly farts down the street, as are there people in England that notoriously do. It was aggressive because it was a last attempt at diminishing the pointless criticism that comes with age, and the correlated lack of understanding that undoubtedly comes because one is so young. But I thank you for your time to make this point all the same, and apologise that it did not meet your expectations.

[Damien Marty]

The expectation I was referring to, if this wasn't clear, was the expectation of being offended. Not that the poem "did not meet my expectations" in a literary sense, but rather that the note (as directed to from the description before reading the poem) gave me an expectation to be offended which in turn would have potentially made me more likely to feel offended.

I thoroughly enjoyed the poem, and I thank you for explaining the significance of the symbolism to me as it makes subsequent readings more enjoyable.