Several of the Greater Nations

Your suicide Wrests the act from the hand So that fire can envelop the bottle And skyward And bright And living Technicolour dances in extremes. We effervesce and burst We rise up and with a fury A million or more We wilt back onto the vine Waiting to be harvested and Transformed into feed for machinery The blocks and the slabs and The blocs and the Slavs And the pointed jagged teeth Of a rusted saw three thousand times the size of the moon We jigsaw and puzzle and pile up And bric-a-brac away the inheritance Of dead men coming into dead men’s fortunes We store up and cascade And chisel At the face of a dam As a plague of locusts descends Within the imagery of Uncle Sam We shoot in succession And with twenty-eight barrels We could split the world to pieces And commit Several of the greater nations Turn and shoot and all goes black As the litter is circulated In samizdat and under purple cloth.