After and against Charles Bukowski
a poem is a city filled with ruins and tunnels
filled with martyrs, refugees, militants, invaders
empty of anaesthesia and antiseptic
filled with dirty rainwater and artificial thunder and hunger
a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a city burning
a poem is a city under guns
a city is a poem with lines left unchanged
but put into a different context
a city is poetry under siege, a city
with its shop windows blown out
or buildings flattened
a poem is a city where God erupts from the dirt
and bites a hole in a tank broadside
with their triangle teeth
where animals shiver from the memory
of explosions and being buried alive,
and children go to sleep in the mud, also shivering
but learning quickly that will have to wait till some vague ‘later’
a poem is a city of poets;
silent, by virtue of being murdered
a poem is a city of journalists;
also silent, also murdered
a poem is this city right now,
2,365.00 miles away
at 2:50 in the afternoon,
the taste of food scraped from the bottom of a pan
no families, no lovers walking down the street
only the world’s policeman
this poem, this city, opening its arms to the world
trying to be patient with a people unfamiliar with ‘self-changing’
no time to mourn, no chance to grow old
both the mountains
and the oceans given the smell of death in time,
a moon bereft of meaning now,
but still,
small songs from broken windows…
this poem is a city, this poem is a nation,
this poem is the world…
and now I leave this behind
to do the work required
and the quiet is elsewhere
and people wait in crowds for food
and cats take their scraps
a video plays on my phone of an Aztec death whistle
a fake throat heralding
human sacrifice
whilst small men rant at a people
they cannot crush.
