Speak for Thyself!

I.

There in the drafty, darkened hall,
limbs and jaws and bones withal,
a row of bodies, nude as sin,
knee by hip, and jaw by chin.

Pale were they, and eyes asunken,
lips were puckered, and mouths were shrunken,
and there amid the mangy throng,
was one I knew, and knew him strong.

Yes, eyes; yes, ears; yes, flaxen hair;
the features that I knew were there.
But not the knowledge of his parts,
what gave him to me was his heart.

His heart, that is to say his whole,
his composite, his living soul,
but sight thereof led not to sigh
of cheer, for he - that ghoul - was I.

But I were me, then who were him?
And how had mind been stripped from limb?
Once one is rent in pieces two,
How can the wit be threaded through?

I have been told 'Speak for thyself!'
by those who witness not this gulf
between the wick that flicks and flits
and the combe that keeps the wits.

II.

A moaning and a twitching gave me start,
And shiftingly those figures broke apart.
Sight of self was lost amid the throng,
trespassed by their eerie, keening song.

Worse yet, their shrouded eyes began to peel,
the sight of all those sightless eyes unreal.
And worser still within that song of bone,
the voice I heard the loudest was my own.

Whence from, this voice that issued from my lips?
Who would to mind perform such censorship?
Oh, clamour and the blabbing of the horde!
I tried to think and could not, so I roared!

"Be silent, beasts; allow me to conjecture!"
and, in response to efforts at prefecture,
my own white face began to twist and gurn,
and spit and scream, and that was how I learned,

as all the fiends took up their cries anew,
my bruit was my articulation true,
that when I turned my thoughts toward my tongue,
resultant din was how my words were sung.

So what, my friends, is poet made to do,
when all their words are rendered cry and hue?
Should I above my brawl try to be heard,
or beauty that I shape be e'er deferred?

A Christmas Tree's Lament

Once upon a winter's eve,
They came in mobs, those deadly thieves!
We spread our roots, our breaths drew in,
And then we bellowed, I and kin:
“Leave here, desist, replant your roots!”
They came for us in shiny boots.
They placed their teeth upon a string,
and showed us to that wicked thing.
They wrapped it round, in their endeavour
to cut us from our roots, to sever
each of us from earthy sphere,
And as we crashed, they cried and cheered!

They stacked us up on deerless sleighs,

And formed with us a foul bouquet,

And as they stole us, engine booming,

I found I was no better than a human.

I was from deep black soil dissected.

Now humans' unearthed state reflected

in my own proud trunk made rootless,

subject now to journey fruitless.

As savaged flesh wept and swelt,

Each jolt and thud was sorely felt

Till we from oily trap alighted,

And heaps of dead and dying sighted.

We might have thought our number small

Until we saw that ghastly haul.

It might have been a minor feud,

an act of impulse, a nasty mood,

but in this vale of broken crowns,

on this necropolitic ground,

at this high reach of Death's grey tide,

was an act of genocide.

And even now, and even yet,

exhausted not was Man's dark threat.

They came in ones and fives and threes.

They drifted up upon the breeze.

But how they differed from rancid stink

was in what they carried: those shards of clink,

that lit their eyes and filled their grip,

and brimmed their dreams and curled their lips.

And of this coin, what was the aim?

Of which foul sport were we the game?

What was the scheme behind our murder?

All was revealed as they began to barter.

And what the price of one arboris,

apart, of course, from its biosis?

Thirty pieces was final toll

to him, the brand new owner of my soul.

With nothing more than mute egress,

my time with kindred deliquesced.

Aye, from my brethren I was split,

And carried then to odorous pit,

shakingly upon their shoulders,

just as the cousin growing colder.

Placed upright by mantelshelf,

in mockery of my rooted self,

now I their furrow did survey

in all its grim and dark decay.

Of all their squalor and unfitness,

was I to be the judge and witness.

And back they looked with eyes agleam,

dashing hopes to dwell unseen.

To me they brought their tawdry garnish,

and I did they begin to furnish,

and when at last they came away,

I stood replete in gaudy lingerie.

And though clothed like courtesan,

my torment only now began,

for now they gulped and gorged and pranced,

frolicked in a state of trance.

I, in the midst of wilding pack,

had turned to aphrodisiac.

Time’s suffrance is ineluctable

yet passage indestructible.

It crept as surely as decay,

until I found I had outstayed

my welcome in that wretched dwelling,

and now my final fate was swelling

in Man's dark heart as they denuded

me of frilly garment, excluded

then from frosty home to street,

my transformation near complete.

Whence had I been sequined guest,

now was forsaken, dispossessed.

And here I am, and here remain,

my human value all but drained.

I lie here butchered in the lane

with others of my green domain.

Who knows what fate may have in store?

And yet I sense there's little more.

My shadow's long; my noose at morning.

There's only time to share this warning.

Should you consort with humankind,

see us, and do not enter blind.

For Man's had many staunch allies

and led each one to her demise.

Get Rich or Die Trying!

Do you see him? The bloke in the cap and overalls. No, not him. Actually, that's a woman. But don't worry. Easy mistake to make. We all look the same down 'ere. No, the one with the empty wheelbarrow, lining up to go down the tunnel. Yeah, him. Bearded, red eyed. Yep. That's how it is. He's waiting for all this lot to come out. String of, what, eight, nine folks coming out with their barrows full of that grey-brown awful-smelling sludge. That one whose sludge is a quivering heap all the way up to his neck. That, ladies and gents, is today's gold star winner. He's gonna get one of the high-up boxes. He'll have to climb up there, mind, at the end of this bloody long shift that lasts every day from infancy till death.

Anyway, there I go. Tunnel's clear now. It's even darker in there than the rest of this place, but at least there's no buttons. You see, all those grey slabs that make up the walls. Sorta four metre square, regular as regiments, all the way up. You look up and your eye can follow the dark in-between lines all the way to heaven. In fact, they actually seem to converge at some point somewhere south of heaven, but you see how high up it goes. Or - more accurately - that's how far down we are. It could even have been a huge pyramid that we're in except that then no light would get down here and some does bounce all the way down here. Get stuck it does. The light goes into your brain and sticks there, becomes part of you, never gets out. Nothin' ever gets out of here, mass or wave form.

I'm out the tunnel now, see how I'm looking at the slabs. Each one's a button. Look carefully and you'll see that pale pattern on it is not just weatherin', it's a symbol. Press the right symbols in the right order, bingo, sludge time. Fill your barrow. Earn a few more points. Me, I always go with wavy lines, hash symbol, triangle, circle, inequality sign, plus, plus, upside-down exclamation mark. Found a few variations that worked, and a few that occasionally pumped out more sludge than I usually get, but this is the one that worked for me most consistently. There I am pushing in the huge square faces of the blocks, more 'n double my height. Some of them are really tight, hard to press in. You feel like you're actually liftin' the whole thing and forcin' it back. Don't tell me we're not strong, despite the revolting stuff they call food here.

Right, but once you've got it pushed in, as I have there, I don't know if they meant it like this, but then you can just about get your fingers and toes in the gap and climb up. How? You learn by falling. You learn by failing. That's the only way. Fall from a low height's my advice. Break a leg on your first day. You won't make it. Dunno what happens to them. They just lie on the dirty sludgy concrete floor screaming and then whimpering for the rest of the day. In the morning - gone. Must come in the night and drag 'em off, I suppose. F'r all I know, they use these same barrows to do it. Imagine. The same broken-wheeled thing I drag around, day after day, could be the same damn thing that drags me off when I'm all finished and done. Who knows what creatures does it either? Dunno if it's creepier to think there's some white-faced night creature to sweep up the human debris, or if it's folk like us what does it.

I'm the first in this section. Others are going past me down other tunnels to other spaces. I'm always glad when I don't have to go down there though. The piles of skulls and bones really get to you. Especially if you know who some of them were. Memento mori's one thing, but seeing yourself in that heap of bones offers no insight nor hope. So I have the space to myself except for those who's climbing up over my head to get at buttons they want on the third or fourth level. Climb like monkeys, they do. Having said so, the shoes they give us is just like a leather bag. Like ballet slippers. Wearin' boots'd be no good. How you supposed to climb in steel toe caps? Anyways, eventually I get all my buttons pressed in, and I feel the tremor before I hear it. "Pipe!" I shout to claim it and pretty much expertly get my barrow turned around probably less than a second before the flap opens on one of the terracotta pipes that stick out the wall, and glorious filthy muck fills my wheelbarrow up, piles right up, wobbling in that obscene way that it does. Nice! You can see that's a nice barrow! You can even see a grim look of satisfaction on my face if you look through all the shadow and hair.

Then I wheelie the thing around careful of folks in a rush coming the other way. We’ve all done it. You ready your barrow full of stinking muck thinking this could be the very one that opens a nice high hatch for you, and some wild barrower comes the other way not seeing anything and clang, there’s two barrows all over the floor and your muck is glugging and bubbling away down one of the little barred drains. Scoop it up with your hands. The one that knocked into you might even help if they don’t pull up their barrow and run off in shame and fear, but by the time you’ve scraped up as much as will stay in your hands, all the pleasure, all the satisfaction has gone, and you’re empty, and your barrow might as well be. However, this is not what the next moments have for me to live, and I’m able to get my barrow back through the tunnel to the tipping place, that great dark mouth in the corner guzzling up yards and yards of slime, just as we guzzle up whatever pathetic trickle it is that life has for us. And then I turn around, and I go back.

Course, I’m looking up to see if one of the huge buttons has come unlatched from the wall. Look at him. I mean me, of course. It’s just that, while I’m outside of myself, looking back, I see another man, so it’s him, even though it’s me. Anyway, you can see from my posture that I’ve been at this a long screed of time, more than eight hours, maybe nine. And I do this every day. I’ve been doing it every day for, well, I’ve counted eight full moons, put it that way. When the door comes unlatched, you scramble up the wall, like I said, toes and fingertips clamped into the tiny grooves between the buttons. None of these cracks would ever hold your full weight, so you have to keep moving. Each one is a pivot, and you can only use the toeholds and fingerholds by moving your weight around them and past them. It’s a real upward scuttle, and after nine, sometimes ten hours of barrowing, it’s a true wonder that any human body can do such a thing, but the final reward, a bed and a meal in a dark, quiet room and time enough to sleep; these are everything after a long shift.

Nothing yet, though, so I’ve to go on barrowing. I’d joke that it could drive you mad, but let me tell you a story about a fellow barrower, no name of course, but he bore the code of X-967-T on his overall, and I suppose that he had the same characters in tattoo because I do, and god knows there’s nothing to separate me from anyone else in this pit other than how much suffering I can take before I go the same way as that poor bastard. Well, X-967-T came to me, one day, early enough in my shift, and I think the beginning of his. His eyes were gold with excitement, and he was saying “This is it. I’m going to get rich. I had a dream. I had a dream. I know the code. Come and watch.” I said to him, “967, don’t do it. I know what you’ve dreamed, and I know what’s up there. Don’t go up there. Don’t go.” But he was already too far gone. Riches and success had filled the vacuum where his ruined soul used to be, so I put down my barrow and watched him scale the wall, hugging himself tight to it, and forcing in this button and that on his way up the wall, zig-zagging upwards between them. I saw his code started square, padlock, wheel, duck’s foot, at symbol, but I lost track after that due to the foreshortening of the higher buttons and weakness of memory. He was just going up and up, yelling, “I’m going to be rich. You can be rich too, 512. Just do what I do! Watch this! I’m going to have a big car and a mansion.” When he was high enough up to look small up there, one of the buttons came unlatched, way up high where I’ve never seen anyone get a bed, so he yanked on it and pulled, and the door came swinging out with him on it. He clambers over the top of it, and looks in. “Oh, my god,” he says, “This is it. I’m rich!” Well, just as has happened before, it wasn’t a pile of money that tipped out, but a lot of white skinny legs with a great big mask of a face amidst it all, a huge skull-like face, and it grabs him and stuffs him into its mouth, and he screams, “I’m doing it! I’m doing it! I’m getting rich! Aaaarrghgh! I’m going to get a trophy wife! Aaaeeeeeeeee! And a private jet! Aaaaagghghh!” And that’s it. He can’t say anymore. The thing has eaten his head. Bits of 967 fall down and land on top of some of the other barrowers, hair and skin and blood, and they just brush it off and keep barrowing, and then someone says, “Happens at least once a moon, that does, stupid bastard,” and I’m not even sure if it’s me who spoke or someone else.