REQUIEM TO CRUELTY (REAL OR IMAGINED)

As I rode home one day, my bicycle tyres
got stuck
in a network of underground spirals
that rose and fell in twisting tramways ~
soon to make me roar and stagger,
crunched in the ruts of a machine
too obscure to name, and yanking me down
to the interrogation.

In the Continuous Waiting Room
I struggled to grow through
a brush-stroked amnesiac wave,
just like at school,
in half-starved innocence,
I struggled to be brave
and well-behaved.

I said “I’m always careful
not to kill people,
   I like their funny ways.”
I asked if I could go back to the scene of the crime,
   a sleepy dullard in disguise.
– Where to? Where’s that?

TV scene of humans being butchered.
   Peer through
   eyes that burst forth
   all their messy liquid languor.

“Behind the brochure,
where the maniac bloaters are reckoned;
where a respectable firm of dignitaries
tuck in and gorge themselves at banquet deaths,
numb their senses at cold expense,
anxious-less and deftly spread
across the lower ledges of the world . . .”

A c
hild freezes inside the news.

Hell hath no fury like my hopes unborn,
trailing blue skies with crucified eyes,
engaging a paltry show laid on by
river-winding, “clever” and
   automatic “believers”
who never need faith or absolution
’cos words often said gain their tread.


There’s something unpleasant about cut-off heads
wailing, waiting to be outside
the fence.
There’s something unpleasant
piled up on a baby in cot deaths,
to swallow hard, and tread soft and slow
on a grown-up’s spiteful pillow.

A decapitated
      mushrooming
            psychic horror . . .





Next time I should describe
just how we live our lives . . .

Entered with kickback,
crazed like a daisy,
thrown down the carriageway,
with bombsite accuracy
to re-mould the one who freely gazes
and leave nothing but
the emotions of a Stuka pilot
in a melody of madness
and broken treaties to the heart of love.

To re-cap:
these brainful baboons
should have let the music bled
in case of being sent to deny
there’s something unpleasant about
    cut-off heads
that, inward to look, would
dreams have seen, if they could.


© 2023 Pete Gioconda & Black Cat Communications
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