1.

                  Remember I am
                  on fire
                  cannot be trusted.

The lending librarian cut from plasticene and toffee
knows the dewey decimal place
where Greek myth can be pulled out of ravel.
This morning a reader's pass
                                    will get you
                          into trouble
now the government has turned bibliographer
the living archive mutated into a bird.
        It's no trouble, a caution and a few hours
answering questions about your fantasies
prove no flight risk you hop out
from stone to stone on stichomythic feet.

The ache comes back on renewal:
you cannot live here, you belong to a different crowd
you won't save unless you pay from the gut.
But the future can see underground, its eyes
make their own light flash
along the subway tracks where everything you've done
blinks off like a solar-fired alarm.
If the living are still here
it will find and add them to the census
which you'll find filed down by the past.

Inspectors rely on repeated structures
to make sense of the chaos of competing forms
that fall on cars and coffins, no wonder
foreign dying looks so simple,
slipping skirts of flesh in antique profile
like the geometry of Muslim wallpaper.
We go together.  Rectangularise the cornered.
If I tell the one about the Byzantine armies, promise
not to believe that we are all human,
that I saw them walking on newsprint in Fallujah?  Then

Of the two donors, the doctor
ceded to his poisoned fetlock, forethought
donated his liver and got life -
in one kill the medicine and
the heat which might preserve us
as we wait in a nest in Tora-Bora
for the samey future on which we're trained.
'So let the curling tendril of the fire
'from the lightning bolt be sent against me,
wind in savage convulse the world
the daily grind makes history and as I
wait to be seen and warned off
by an opened magazine,
consultants blame the time
on government targets blasted
from the trees of the Hesperides.
The heroic labourer has a right
to unpaid employment benefit (laughter).
The rubber tapper meek in the trees
also waits and is not known to speak.

Don't force an axe against them:
I'll need to eat them later, for
the tree of their fields is my life,
and when I am finished burn them
in envy of my self and that ash
fertilises the earth is another irony.
If I know the tree is not for meat,
cut it back in defence.  The land is there
to be used, and without nerve
damage there is no sound of harm.  If the lake
covers a gas field I suck it,
and cover the green line with
arum seeds. There is nothing here
but transfer. They mean
to burn everything, even the lungs.

2.

The hope drunk in which we dress ourselves
for a day labour gaming
with maximum power and killer graphics
taking it hard, the must-haves this autumn
whinge at the prison of the veil.
Secularism is another orthodoxy we can't shake,
to recognise the politics in fancy dress
also buries its charge under the base
though the countdown is not due to start
for you or your oldest child
or for the slaves you inherit after that.

Dress the wound in salted water
as the salted water rises:
fashion turns dressing from repeat
to a 'statement' of 'interest', marking the day
mine one eternal need to keep out the cold.
Garment of fire, washed in boiling water or sandia
decon foam. Judicial molestation in orange one piece
or Walmart sweatshirt made by the guest
workers in Vietnam, 'seeds of war in the outfits
'we array by the full-length mirrors of Beximco
and Daewoosa.  In the grove of war hangs
a fleece of recycled Coke bottles,
boob-tubes and desert grades making out
the farthest voyage from Sunrise Exports
of Mumbai is inevitable, we can do no more
than vote with our feet dragged over the gap
to Níκη, though in the docks
they tell of ears floating on the surface
and a chin like a monkey's in the wash.

The consumption loop is politics,
potential flash points all down
the supply chains the head
stepped on lights
her gown before her maid knew what was happening.
Everywhere she goes she makes
money. Can we break the news of repetition
the vulture supposed of 'nowhere' the target liver
returning to the impact to look for any
growth are given the shirt off their backs
washed out by tide, released from the burden
of fertility and insecticide by a little powder
the tick-tock waves the motive, the distance

3.

By 'accident' and 'sacrifice' we have heard
how the irrational like a bunker-buster
can reach the deepest dugout. 
But reason for penetration
is a substitution also countenanced by revenge:
it's ok, it's only a story and the detention
of its I they recommend is indefinite.

Come closer.  The doting wife
burps the Tupperware, robes the patriarch
but his sacrifices overstimulate the sexual charm.
She has kept too much aside for the uncertain
future, and watches the body she meant
to cherish turn to batter in its lining.
The introversions of sacrifice that char
other countries begin with this one,
spent after his labours to be kept close to home.
The janitorial sub-contractor rips himself to you.

Our family is also known to worship the well.
Our turn to nominate the victim is magic
as a campaign donation gives the vultures
power over reconstruction.  They choose life
incense the flame, the father a pillar
or a blue tongue reaching towards heaven,
and reap the substitute teacher held
captive here in a bunker of volumes.
The magician votes. The word supplies
where the bodies were bungled in a sundried wrap.
And though the beloved cannot be blamed,
though Medea is known as the foundress
of medicine in an oil-rich state, I am not
complete in horror if I suppose
she did feel sorry finally.