I bedded on a hard rock,fell asleep,
listening to Haydn.
Gassy water churned
my frame, my pale
cuisine. The Metro
stopped in my dream.
Even homeless immigrants,
stars, carried on
as proper citizens,
comfortable in their arrogant
tax-paying. My storm-tossed
pillow time gave up
to the secret police,
seeking a collaborator
for inquiry into dark
passages they’d been told
in a recent sermon
ignored by the networks.
The dream soon gave way
to living daylight but no
body rose in the clatter
of the nightmare.
A store-bought nuclear force,
I kept running, disco to disco,
smashing open painted windows,
letting in fresh diesel exhaust,
allowing beer-drenched sweat
and mass-marketed smoke respite.
Cold neighborhood air
invaded the dance floor,
staccato electricity circuited
into glorious acoustic form,
transforming the half naked
into proper believers clad
in white tuxedos, perfectly
applied makeup, galley slaves
swathed in sero-negativity;
they wept with humble Pei,
leaping through glass pyramids
onto display of tourist-friendly
masterpieces. The cold barrel
of a very old profession
woke me with a start.
My panic left fitfully
sleeping puddles
on the boutique of far-right
barricades, where the rest of gay
had been concentrated,
unable to correspond with the rest
of Europe without handcuffs,
plastic gloves, and generic facial masks.
An insensitive distance,
ruined Lutheran temples
and looming Roman Eglise
kept egalitarian sympathy over
our huddled bodies until one
of us fell, at first from exhaustion,
then from hunger, finally,
from a luridly antiseptic fever,
a disease so clinical, so
mathematical, democratic, even,
in its efficiency, in our death
throes, we called it civilized.
I pulled a young missionary corpse
into my perforated arms, running
my face into the mud and rain
caking his blond features
before using him to shield
my unnoticed passing into the side
walks of the unborn.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
