25. the rot is on

How hard again the transit










Caretaker in a girls’ boarding school

I took care of the feminine bodies

With hand unnoticed.



I washed their dirty clothes

I cleaned their bedrooms and bathrooms

I counted every item of clothing – checked carefully

That the tags stuck – counted holes in the meshes

At the barriers on the boundaries explicitly surrounding

Our hallowed ground.



I appreciated them being always ‘round.



There were no dead

There were no strikers

No internecine becrippling of the sweet-smelling troops.



Gravely I used to fondle the mud

How well I remember now the mud

The soft malleable mud where their buttocks and their piss had lain

Smilingly beckoning

Evocatively dreaming of creation.



How well the tasty mud

Now that the ground is unyielding

Now that the dead and the strikers sinisterly come sidling to our side

Sick snarling brutes

With evil intentions of mayhem wreckage thorough extermination

Now that the pillows are nails

Now that the eager sores are never asleep

Now that the torment lingers

Now that the plague rules the roost

Now that famine is ubiquitous.



There’s no clean water

The mines are crumbling on our very heads

And the strikers don’t strike with the paltry sticks and the makeshift flint shovels

At the stony marbled coal that hides maybe the pure torrents underneath.



We are trapped in those galleries

Dive into whichever side and the sharp griddle of raw bord cuts at your wrists

The hard strata of ore surly draw farther prisons on your scalp

Shines the blood on the shiny carbuncles.



We are all in transit

Make fucking do!

I shout to the strikers whose baseless uproar threatens our work

We are husks borne by the draft of the revolving doors of renewal

Don’t you fucking understand?



Because they were appalled that I wouldn’t allow the dead to be properly buried

What the fuck would “properly” mean

I shout

It is the fucking same

It is the fucking same

It is the fucking same!



Buried or not a corpse is a fucking corpse

The rot is on either way

The flies the grubs the maggots and the bugs

The patches and splotches of liquid rot

It is the fucking same “properly” or not!



So nice that those girls were

The fuzz in my guts (grown ferocious

With extraneous eyes and fangs

Devouring each other – the more proximate the first)

Even the fuzz infallibly yearns

That buried or unburied

Rotting away all the same

The strikers and the dead were already one and the same

As the ugly and the beautiful were for me the same

Indiscriminate I in my attentions

To the scrumptious hulls they so carelessly and adorably left behind

Anonymous underwear which my wounds healingly did wrap

The counted items so deeply inspected before they went into the washing machines

The molted meltings so cherished

The abandoned themselves that they so blatantly forgot or even despised

In their transit to the paradise

Of a future sure promised

Yet so long to really come by to

As witness

Alas

As witness

Our plight

Where promise gurglingly beckons indeed

Though indeed so very faintly now...