|
Welcome my little alien, sorry victim of past fascist crime,
no need to reveal pain to elevate yourself in my eyes.
We are a world of brothers, sharing desire for the perfect rhyme,
to restrain the garnished soldier and soothe the babies' cries.
To pseudo-happiness, I give it a one-handed applause
as a wholesale destruction is branded to this society's cause.
A trillion laser bills rusting in United Space --
An artful smile displayed by a senator's tactical wife --
A diamond man pushing rocks on the sidewalk race --
The absorbed Third World Nations wide-eyed surprised with life --
the vegetables and fruits groped in democracy fables
have had their stems and stalks cleaned off at the advertising tables.
To you my friend I give warning … keep it as a momento.
Our Lady Justice mothers wolves disciplined in archaeological gymnastics,
Power, slavery, and music are kindred today as we achieve vigorous crescendo,
With honored men of devotion twisting constitution as we would elastics.
The multinational elite has acquired this she-serpent as an asset --
their cunning talent to bribe, cheat and steal is only one facet.
This culture of complaint in all its perplexity protests with a lisp.
Trust is a senile chronicle, skeletal fractions remain in glass-cased display,
and a deadbolt contributes deception like a will-o-the-wisp.
Welcome to controlled anarchy, psychotic optimism dressed in pretty array …
man and machine haggle with the earth, their favorite 'symbiotic' buddy --
they cleanse their hands with her water as their mumbled repentance is bloody.
The binding political fibers of our 'common wealth' bares the ultimate paradox --
sixty percent hungers while the highborn gasp in masked dismay through Technicolor heaven,
sheltered by an artist's sketching of three ravenous bears being tranquilized by Goldi-locks.
The majority grasps for subsistence in a baited snare yearning for their dough to leaven,
with voice chilled into silence by the festivity of industrial champagne,
where landowners answer themselves, not some social services peasant campaign.
Populace bleeds herself for the decline, hating her own prescription of warfare.
the people focus the massacre on the subliminal enemy - the stranger in you and I,
who would plead, cry, and beg for the prolonged hypnosis of materialistic glare.
In venture to achieve personal illumination, what and what not are you willing to sanctify?
My friend, over here when discussing liberty there will indeed be a great statistic of buyers,
but soon you too will learn with democratic self-indulgent style, we are just better liars.
The Vampirical Chameleon
A Few Words On Infrared
From the comments made by an ex-U.S.S.R citizen, my response of "we all fight our own war" is the idea that sparked this poem. She was speaking of the experiences and memories of Soviet containment behind the Iron Curtain. I was speaking of the exhaustion from a perpetual seige of ignorance and irrationality not only from others, but myself as well. My intention was to state that metaphysical (mind / mental) pain can be as potentially torturous and destructive as being physically-bodily restrained and/or disabled. To this end I wrote what I saw around me: Western civilization in a loathsome and violent state of contradiction and hypocrisy.
I was also trying to say something more.
Implied in the words of this poem is that while the East had deliberately erected physical barriers to coerce individuals, the West had inadvertently created -- 'brick' by 'brick' -- a labyrinth of mind to bewilder, paralyze and lose individuals completely. Far from being an empty threat to one's well being, the war that was more formidable to me was not the one you could physically grasp, fight and knock down, but the one that was seemingly intangible to touch and invisible to the eyes.
Over time I have consistently thought the greater challenge was in trying to understand the more entrenched psychological factors that created such barriers and labyrinths -- be they physical or metaphysical -- in the first place. To question things and ideas, to look beyond surface images, to see what others do not.
I Dream In Infrared is one of my earliest attempts to comprehensively summarize how I viewed a fragmented mankind. It provided a foundation, one can say, to continue thinking upon and expand my knowledge in the years to follow. Though I no longer see the world exactly like I did then, Infrared is a poem which, through its advanced structure and style of expression over previous works, reveals a growing seriousness and determination to document and understand the complexities of humanity, myself included.
Infrared is also special to me in the sense of it being the forerunner, or 'template', of later poems Salis (1993) and Purity (1999). Both of which reflect a more disciplined, streamlined, intellectually clean, and polished self -- in the composition of a poem and the comprehension of human life.
In the context of three poems spanning eight years of my life, Infrared can be said to express 'this is how it is', Salis is the resolve of 'I am going to do something about it', and Purity provides the long-sought ideas to answer the concerns, questions and conflicts of its two predecessors.
|