Charles Bukowski

The Sun Weilds Mercy

and the sun weilds mercy but like a jet torch carried to high, and the jets whip across its sight and rockets leap like toads, and the boys get out the maps and pin-cuishon the moon, old green cheese, no life there but too much on earth: our unwashed India boys crosssing their legs,playing pipes, starving with sucked in bellies, watching the snakes volute like beautiful women in the hungry air; the rockets leap, the rockets leap like hares, clearing clump and dog replacing out-dated bullets; the Chineses still carve in jade,quietly stuffing rice into their hunger, a hunger a thousand years old, their muddy rivers moving with fire and song, barges, houseboats pushed by drifting poles of waiting without wanting; in Turkey they face the East on their carpets praying to a purple god who smokes and laughs and sticks fingers in their eyes blinding them, as gods will do; but the rockets are ready: peace is no longer, for some reason,precious; madness drifts like lily pads on a pond circling senselessly; the painters paint dipping their reds and greens and yellows, poets rhyme their lonliness, musicians starve as always and the novelists miss the mark, but not the pelican , the gull; pelicans dip and dive, rise, shaking shocked half-dead radioactive fish from their beaks; indeed, indeed, the waters wash the rocks with slime; and on wall st. the market staggers like a lost drunk looking for his key; ah, this will be a good one,by God: it will take us back to the sabre-teeth, the winged monkey scrabbling in pits over bits of helmet, instrument and glass; a lightning crashes across the window and in a million rooms lovers lie entwined and lost and sick as peace; the sky still breaks red and orange for the painters-and for the lovers, flowers open as they always have opened but covered with thin dust of rocket fuel and mushrooms, poison mushrooms; it's a bad time, a dog-sick time-curtain act 3, standing room only, SOLD OUT, SOLD OUT, SOLD OUT again, by god,by somebody and something, by rockets and generals and leaders, by poets , doctors, comedians, by manufacturers of soup and biscuits, Janus-faced hucksters of their own indexerity; I can now see now the coal-slick contanminated fields, a snail or 2, bile, obsidian, a fish or 3 in the shallows, an obloquy of our source and our sight..... has this happend before? is history a circle that catches itself by the tail, a dream, a nightmare, a general's dream, a presidents dream, a dictators dream... can't we awaken? or are the forces of life greater than we are? can't we awaken? must we foever, dear freinds, die in our sleep?

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