I. The River of Death

The bullies always ruled the playground.

The thick and the fast,
the quick and the dead.
Here the Morlocks get ever shorter,
hungrier for human bones.

Lead runs through your coarse veins.
It pushes gray into a black heart
behind barbarism's transhuman new skin.

Strolling the noisy banks
of the river of death,
I contemplate the myth of patience.

The noise. The rage.
The blood-spitting fun.
The future is inside-out.

The wheezing asthmatic young
suck on your tumoral pipe,
waiting for their turn.

Look both ways and pay attention.
The dark involatile tarmac
was never meant for the living.
Red man, real man, stand to attention.

Patience breathes,
by the river of death.

Given time,
this traffic island
might combust spontaneously.


II. The Unutterable

You kill me every day.

I am obstacle. I am disaster.
I am thrown to the lions.

Stertorous ignition,
snorting, braying, automatic hate,
and the grill races to the meat.

I am the sleeper. I am the animal.
I am the corpse that ruptured your bumper.
I am the fly on your windscreen.

You drove a valley through my torso.
You took a tour of my pudenda.
Your hands are clean.

I am unraveled.

Cat's eyes meet human eyes
in the union of man and machine,
a painting of eternal sorrow.

But blood drains quickly down the gutter,
and skin burns fast like rubber,
and your scream is silenced by a pillow.

I am the crash test.
You are the dummy.

You have your sacrifice
burning on the altar of freedom.
A soul on the scales,
balancing safety and liberty.

Never say it,
but there is no pointless death.
No pointless death,
but say it to nobody.

I am alive.
You are unalive.
When you pass you take a chunk from me.

I am finite.
The lightest scratch repeated sufficiently
reduces me to splinters.

I am unidentifiable.


III. When the Highways Engineer Repents

He works to expand our horizons,
to bring us home,
to connect you and me.
Blameless. He takes the grim toll
he made allowance for.
Blameless, we all
must pick peas from the fire.
No-one feels guilty enough.

The road is brought to silence at last.
The traffic cones stand authoritative:
they tell you all you need to know,
all you need to do.

But the blood on the tarmac
infects your mind, and
if you are not scared of the truth,
scared to think,
you look for witnesses.
Who was right? Who was wrong?

The belisha beacon blinked.
The policeman slept.
The tree stump tucked its head underground.
The curb crept away.

Why does Mother Nature
abandon us to chaos?
Perhaps in lament of decency,
perhaps in pure disgust.

A curtain falls,
it hides the innocent
eyes of the stars,
lest they see what people die for.

But the highways engineer will not repent
one second before the sun explodes,
and nor will Man
make an honest account of his work,
and nor will life on Earth
make sense to itself.