Category: Poetry

The child of free education and no war, a working-man’s grandchild, trussed up in an expensive education and still no war and you choose not to eat and you call yourself oppressed. Are we not always oppressed? Is that not the essence of the human condition — some eternal struggle against the next odds? From hunt and gather to the roller-coaster of capitalism, a train of twists and turns, myths of gold and myths of oil and handshakes and photographs in suits (such are promises), rattling across the globe, faster, faster, faster, faster, flashing faster than the we of the world can possibly see until the train has long passed through and the lessons of history are too slow — too slow, too slow — to catch the crackle of the present as it breaks. And we have all been spread — scattered, like seed — across the earth, human capital shifted in great waves of migration and tireless trickles of restless endless voyaging. Shifted on the waves, on slave-ships and convict-ships and passenger ships and aeroplanes, shifted and drifted, distant, and diffused. Scattered, like seed, wildflowers across the earth, with our beauty — latent, potent, laden, gone — and our memory — latent, potent, laden, gone — and our books. And the web of the spider spins around us, silently, slowly, weaving its soft silver sinews, miles and miles of twists, of cables, woven not from silk but fibre-optics, underground and under seas, great clusters of neurons shooting across the globe so that mother in Taiwan sees her child in Atlanta and all the gripping webs around the globe grow tighter and the silk knots we seek to loosen only distract us from the tighter tightening ever-tighter grip and the bright lights dazzle our senses. We are scattered — ashes on the wind, like seed — wildflowers across the earth, clinging to soil like weeds in the cracks of the pavements and the walls and the concrete and the shards of metal and glass we call homes. We flower and fluster and die — ashes on the wind, more dust on the city streets. More earth to turn and seeds — newly scattered, ashes, fed pesticides and painkillers — left to flower and fluster and die.