Samizdat Poems

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.