AND THE BLACK ANGEL

AND THE BLACK ANGEL

 

And the black angel of my igneous outrage

warps space into a negative shape

like a mold

and pours itself out in words

like metal drawn from savage ore

into a flaming sword.

I live in the twenty-first century.

I want to kill something in a way

that gives death a whole new meaning

liberates it from the living

like an entirely new outlook on life.

I used to look up at the summer constellations

and wonder about the night

but now I labour on the nightshift

along with millions of other slaves

and when I look up at the sky

on a cigarette break

all I can see

are the brutally twisted stars

of the barbed wire that surrounds me like the Milky Way.

And we all live under the same sign

like a halfway house on day parole

in the inner city slums

of a re-zoned zodiac

waiting for the funds to arrive

to turn all these dumps into skyscrapers.

The ants stroke the peony like a planet in bud

to tell it when to bloom

and a big star walks into the room

and everyone pales in its light like the ghosts

of who they might have been

if they weren’t so green with potential.

So many die like flies against a windowpane.

So many have been uprooted like weeds from paradise

they’ve stationed legions of spears like gates

and hot-wired high walls like nightclub bouncers

around the last blade of grass that grows in Eden.

But the facts don’t begin where the metaphors stop.

I’ve folded the scimitar of the moon

like eleven dimensions

of Damascene steel

to give it an uncompromising edge

to cut through the napes

of the hydra-headed succubi

who crush us in their coils

like corporations who want to get close to us personally.

Banks are evil.

Credit-card companies are evil.

The blackjack dealers in the casinos

of the health insurance companies are evil.

Boeing and Northrup and Wall Street are evil.

Haliburton is evil.

The cell phone company and Ontario Hydro are evil.

A man who franchises the vote to everyone

by selling guns to theocratic children is evil.

The Vatican that hates

the female principle of life enough

it’s become a gynophobic hive of celibate bees

molesting the flowers of the children

like priestly sunspots perverting

the honey of their innocence

like the pollen of the original sin they stick to

is evil.

And the pimp-daddy cable company

that hooks its clients up like a dealer

to a bad drug that’s been buffed by government regulation

is evil.

And the contractor in Iraq

who feels that life is just a video-game

you play with real people who bleed

to prove your dick’s as macho as your rifle

and you’re true to your tatoos

is evil.

The reciprocity

of atrocity for atrocity

like the balance of vengeance in the holyland

that gouges one eye out

for the other that was gouged out

of the same face

they both turn toward God

bleeding and blind

who says vengeance is mine

as they ask for a truce

in their trade relations with hate

and white phosphorus flowers over Gaza like jellyfish

and no birds sing in the branches of the candleabra

that is planted in quicksand like peace

on another man’s land.

Evil makes one master

a slave picking oranges

in the groves his grandfather kept like goldfish

and makes the other

the thief of his own heritage

as his children age faster than time

can keep up to them like a war-crime.

And the politicians walk and talk

like men at a safe distance

who are sure of their medical plans

and the leniency of their indexed pensions

discussing cuts in welfare cheques

and chemotherapy

to keep the rich from suffering

the rising costs of compassion

and even the devil

keeps his word to God like cancer

never to forgive them.

It’s one thing to be killed by a tiger

that doesn’t need to steal what it eats

but it’s altogether another

to die slowly to meet the demands

of leeches maggots and tapeworms

colonizing the meat on your plate

like your heart your blood your eyes.

Can’t you feel their eggs

hatching like rice crispies

and boring into your forehead

like the foreign policies

that govern your everyday thoughts?

Life rots before it’s dead now

and death has grown as lean as a crackhead

on the morsel of flesh that’s left to take to the grave

as a token of what’s to bury.

Everyone’s looking for fireworks at the end

of the Mayan calendar

when time goes extinct

and the Four Horsemen of Revelation

trample the earth like hail in a vineyard

but my black angel moves like the shadow

of a hashashim down

from the top of his world mountain overview

through the night

like the eclipse of an anticlimactic apocalypse

and puts the blade of the new moon

up to the jugular of all those

who have lived like anti-matter

on the dreams of others

and bleeds them like an oilslick

that has dirtied the water it whored.

 

PATRICK WHITE