J.B. Mulligan

death of a monster

The soldiers came, and you tried to crawl away,
and fell into a darkened room
where bodiless, white-eyed heads with sharpened teeth
circled and lunged and tore at you.
They moaned and prayed and cursed you – and their hair
was combed and oiled by giggling virgins.
But worse than that, the blade of God's disdain
forever sawing at your throat.

  *

Your family, somewhere, wept
when they heard that you had died.
They saw the boy you'd been –
as someone I know has seen
the father of his childhood,
lost beneath fallen stones,
smiling a vanished smile.
We bleed the same hot blood –
and I will not weep for yours.
Your children, stiff with grief,
are better than you deserve,
unless they snatch up the savage knife
and go screaming for random throats.

  *

We're home to a savage thing, torn
by each other, by the heart's
crude claw, digging out of the chest
to unfurl its crooked wings
in the moon-silvered air,
to squeak and hunt the small,
to soar and cut in the night
away from the sun's
hot and merciless, always-tearing hand.

  *

Part of my mind (the Christian part,
and some of Islam also can try)
wants to comprehend your pain,
an understanding I'll never feel
you've earned -- and that is not for you
(there's nothing I have that is for you),
but keeping caged the potential beast
in me -- or trying to keep it caged –
or only letting it out to hunt
whatever needs to be hunted.... But
to keep the way to avoid the sin
your hunt became (or always was).

  *

The risk is forced: one path cuts up the mountain
ragged as lightning, waiting to be walked
away from the torrential thundering rise
of blood-dark currents, up through crashing falls
where slipping means I may fall to your depth
and earn the curse I happily pour on you.

There is, perhaps, a stretch of calm beyond,
clear water, cool to the throat, and to the face.
And then further climbing, endless, needed.

J.B. Mulligan © 2011

summa humanitis

Women dead with coat hangers in them.
Fetuses like deli scraps.
Christ on our cross, we offer you
the best that we have,
the most we can do.

In the valley of the damned,
even the carrion demons
snarled in the shadows, starving.

from far away

It's easy to bray and roar
for distant troops to die
for glory and for us.
It's harder to hold back.
But that is not what makes
it right to spend their blood,
their families and time.
To spill this carefully,
to hoard these willing gems
till cause can make it good...
not pride or noise or flag,
but stone necessity --
that is when to set
the lions out to roar.

parade of the victims

Everyone’s a nigger now.
Or a Jew. Or a Palestinian
being killed by the Jews
being killed by....

I would be one myself,
but even I couldn’t
quite swallow that one.
(And what if I forget
the way back,
the secret password?)

So many dead, bleeding,
raped, hacked like melons:
Armenians, Tutsi, Irish –
history is a spike-furred,
drooling wolf above the throat
of somebody helpless:
a long, frail form, arms
akimbo, clothing torn,
a figure from Goya,
but somebody real,
whose child died
moments later.

The calibrations of pain
give us numbers, and blur
the true and global agony,
And the tender, selfish heart
knows what only it can feel
beneath the armor of the skin.

The pain of another is distant sadness.
Even a lover hides behind eyes:
how can we capture a stranger
with such frail, inadequate arms.

on rotting vines

children lit and thrown
sweet bombs brief stars
hatred flaming in innocents

such fertile soil eager
for the seeds of the future
but poured into an empty past
and lit and thrown away

J.B. Mulligan © 2011