lives and times of real-time ghosts

now that the red rags are out
now that the bulls are fuming
now that the kids are dying
now that the ones with the rags are happy that they can speak of some dead kids who are clearly more important than some other dead kids
now that the ones with the rags can fill their arsenal with the cheerleaders hooting full-blast from the sidelines
now that love is an app
now that hatred is cool
now that hunger is outdated
now that politics is for the losers
now that the soul is a Martian apologetic
now that the soul is blue and grey
now that the music is a sound coming from a box
now that the music is punctured
now that the ghosts howl, deadbeat
now that the ones with red rags can unleash missiles and civilization
now that its trending to bomb the bulls back to the stone ages
now that food has become a diminishing return for real and nobody gives a bull about that because its not trending to give a bull about food being a diminishing return
now that the rivers are places where the monsters of iron pee
now that i visit the whorehouses, where i used to visit to make love, to fuck
now that i see kids being put in boxes and killed for eternity behind benches and tables with computers and switches that decide what will happen to the kids who can't sit behind computers and switches because they are too busy getting bombed knifed castrated and starved
now that newspapers decide what cycle the newspaperboy would ride
now that poets self-publish outputs on roses and love with the money they get from people they call sir and those people get money from the people they call sir and those people get money from people they call savages in need for upliftment through bulldozers drones and nuclear warheads
now that Lorca is a dead guy with a bullet between his eyes rotting in some mass-grave somewhere copy-pasting whose poetry affords many a good fuck
now that the soldiers have taken my sisters of blue mercy away
now that chocolate boy soldiers save the day by selling chocolates on tv
now that doctors enter temples of love to diagnose chickenpox for the soul
now that doctor faustus mentors icarus to sell aeroplane tickets on tv
now that the heart and the guts are one and are ready to be ripped apart any given sunday
now that abortion is free and men in uniforms who perform that operation with sticks rods guns and bayonets get gallantry medals pinned on them and their pictures on textbooks wherefrom kids get to know who their heroes and saviours are and men without uniforms who perform that same operation with swords and butcherknives on women who belong to the hell where all the nasty others belong become ministers and get to decide whom to pin the medals on and whose pictures are to appear on books for the kids to learn
now that poverty is philosophised in air conditioned rooms where gloomy people in shiny suits pretend to listen to gloomy people in shiny suits
now that there's music and revolution oozing out of coffee shops that are built by uplifting certain savages from certain rehabilitation colonies and flophouses that aren't cool enough to be where the music and the revolution are
now that i haven't shed a single drop of blood in any battlefield which makes me the perfect expert to speak on blood and battlefields
now that wisdom belongs to people with money who need more ignorance for more money
now that peace belongs to profiteers who need more war for more peace
now that tears belong to the circus where dreams, well insured, are ringmasters and the lions of hope shiver below sanguin and sangfroid electricity
now that everything we own can be brought and sold
now that everything we wish for can be clicked upon
now that the attic-room-soldier can't step out because there are barbed wires on every bit of earth
now that the earth that used to smell of the green motherly childhood mornings smell of chemistry labs
now that the shadows of death get longer than shadows of life by the inch and to the hilt
now that there's virus in the realm of the truly lost
now that there's anger simmering in the hearts of the healers
now that there's venom spewing from the gutters that never yielded poetry
now that Plato pats Aristotle on the back and says: 'i told you so, kid!'
now that Aaron is a face that died
now that Che is a coffee-mug that lived
now that
now that my mind veers away from Bodhidharma
now that my flames flicker as ghostcandles in faceless graveyards
now that my fingers twitch around the roses that don't bloom except in fake-poetry that's as far away from life as i am from you
now that the moon wilts in sadness that used to make gypsies from lost lands dance by fires all night and that used to make rain fall on the ghosts - damned, decimated, howling with the coldest breezes from the realm of saturnalia of all dead stars
now that you, priestess of my dead stars and dead dreams, float along the bloodless phantom-tides that swell
swell
past the eyes of the Homer
past the ears of Beethoven
past the haunted lores that whisper garbled words of pain to children lost in this ghastly wilderness,
that ghastly wilderness
and everything in between - nuggets that shine and nuggets that don't
now that Orpheus is dead and Euridice will never come out
now that Bacchus and his friends rule the brazen cars with Fergus
now that Orpheus doesn't sing as he floats
now that Behula doesn't weep as she floats
now that the Ophelia doesn't sing as she floats
now that she isn't a great white lily but a bloated corpse like a million other bloated corpses
now that my love will never be a song
now that my hatred will never be a revolution
now that my hope will never climb mountains
now that my faith will be a pile of lies told, retold, untold
now that my dreams will try to be your dreams and die in thirsty pursuit
now that my nightmares will be your nightmares and yours will be mine - perfect and cold, silent like huge ancient statues
now that my fire will scorch the soil
now that our crops of gold will turn into gold and there will be no crops and there will be much gold and Midas, once the king, will stare at his daughter's statue forever, eyes fixed at the goal -
absolute unqualified annihilation
absolute unqualified jack of spades
now that eight and eight pawns will swim in this battlefield of light and darkness in the marsh of Bhula Masan
now that you will never be me and i will never be you,
the rags flutter mad
the bulls charge mad
the bombs rage mad
the knives shine mad
tigers leap out from heart of hearts
flames leap out from ancient trees on fire
wolves leap out from creeks of lost time and aim straight for the throat
all hounds of earth hunt all rabbits of earth down
all spiders of earth inch closer to all flies of earth each passing second
vines of pure poison creep up along pillars and posts where we had etched our love when we were soldiers and when we had conjured up our nightmares thinking they were dreams,

now that we know that the game is on
now that we know that we are a part of it despite everything
it's the perfect time to think of dinosaurs that roamed the naked earth for a hundred and sixty-five million years.