The Dream of Mud and Fingernails

Feel no shame for clinging to a dream

if in reality we are hanging from a tree,
in beating rain, raped by weather
as well as uniforms with boots of leather.
Mud and gravel and a mind unravelled
to amount to an empty space
for what lengths can sunken eyes travel?
A curious task, an object of intrigue:
push long needles through filthy skin,
to draw some essence whilst injecting fatigue.
Lamb and Tyger, together in a lab,
both squeaking with bloodlust, in ecstatic wrath,
as if both Cain and Abel
wanted murder, while the Tower of Babel
was a mudslide down a landfill.
Sweeping filth off the enclosed walls of a town as a memorial
where hidden shrines cry to some immaterial
vague father figure, who answers not
but duly condemns the picture
of an escaping river of human ashes.
“Oh the water reprieved”, they can scream in rapture,
for the currents steal the ashes, beyond the ability to capture
the filth under the fingers as the hands dug through mud
to form a pathway where the man was shot.
The end of the tunnel once showed a firing squad,
but now there stands a defiant statue that flinches not
at the sight of a rifle.
If the real men cried, were their lives trifle?
The grand statues defiantly stands above the wet ground,
above the mud, where some few dozen bodies were found.
Like a grotesque Noah’s ark, it bore two of every kind.
There was man, a mother, a queer and a child.
Now we’d wash our hands clean,
but bars of soap mixed with water produce but bloodied cream,
and the rivers thick with ashes wash away none of the obscene
human wish for a moment that is serene,
and a wild fantasy dreamed up with eyes closed
to avoid black and white photos of cold prose
detailing the calculated numbers and figures,
that dug through filth with mud under their fingers.
The Ten Commandments were carved on stone,
but now rock is scraped with days counted to kill time alone.
Each day a line scratched to the surface,
to reveal the little girl’s drawing of a snowman,
was reviewed as hardly perfect,
and instead produced on demand some crayon colourings
of the days the rain brought the bodies
back above the ground, flooded and floating.
Chalk lines formed hairs worn thin,
Pencils drew the bones that reached from within
and tried their hardest to eat through the skin.
To consider the crematorium, I can just as well,
trace my steps back to the soiled shores of the river,
where the ashes floated and I now shiver and quiver,
and decide that upon my death, bury me in a hidden place,
with a led armour to drag my body away from this disgrace
that was inflicted upon any human body
that was tweaked in a laboratory
sealed to vaults and chambers,
and now displayed in print of some museum lobby,
as an acclaimed reminder, though it captures not
the thud made by the body as it fell to the wet mud,
and how the assembled line of naked men
thought not of shame and pride when,
the guards played and created all their fantasies of sin,
the pictures capture naught of this,
for pictures knew naught of sounds back then,
during the days spent in bunks biding time,
whilst man slaughters the Lamb as if by design,
as if the thin arms were created to dig through the grime,
and the mud, which we must not forget,
as splashing boots march through the barbed wire,
waltzing in formation through the gates of regret.
Be these gates out on city streets,
hidden by trees of fallen leaves
or on the circles of Dante’s Hell,
or even attached to humanity when we look behind
and see only the swinging of branches
of hanging trees and the naked dances
performed in front of beatings and a looming gun,
destroyed at dawn,
surgically reconstructed during the disappearance of the sun,
to crawl through yet another day spilling blood,
and filling the fingernails crawling through more mud.
Flickering eyes take photos that seem
to fill a human mind through motions on a screen
and the sunken eyes of man perceive no esteem

as the atrocious exhibition was conjured and founded by a beautiful human dream.

By JPV

Copyright March 2006