Can You Please Stop Screaming?

    Beyond and above

The ragged barbed wire  

Pale morning bleeds a thin ribbon

Over resting guns     In the churned-up, scoured terra

Craters, filled with grey sky, shine

And shimmer in patient trepidation;

Holes blown in the world as we know it     Here, where clothes are sodden

Flesh rots on the bone

And the spark has to fight

    Blood soaks through gauze around the boy’s head

Ridges of stitches like carved meat

White vans full of clip-on IDs and

Sweat soaking through short work sleeves

All your thoughts are read; ‘The response

must be equal to the threat.’

The dragging claw marks of a 12hr gestation

Who would notice a fever in the desert?

Now there’s blood on the bulkhead

Smoking in the dimmed OR

Lights of a nuclear power control room

And radio echoing down the halls

It will make your physical form transparent

And shed it as easy as polythene

In Reactor 4 there’s something hungry hiding

OPENING SHOT:

[Driveway,

night] A

Doctor

Stands facing the

Camera, steadily

Burning Beneath a stained glass backdrop and

Bright neon striplights

A man in ornate robes

Lifts a scimitar high and

Severs the throat of

The labouring mother, as

A child is lifted from

The discarded carcass.

Waves of blood wash

Clean from the floor

Ready for the next

Expectant vessel. Children carried by the ankle

Piled high on one another

Are left crawling, unobserved

In the dirt; their small hands

Grasping, stretching for

The sky as, from a podium,

An aged, overweight official

In a uniform wearily

Tears off and tosses down

A crust Once adolescent and of use

They line themselves up in

Dutiful submission as

Industrialised sacrifices

To clear space and fertilise

Far-flung foreign fields Manacled chains of women

Unkept and unkempt, wedged

Between the fences of

Cramped work camps shuffle

Shoulder-to-shoulder

Beneath banners reading ‘FREEDOM’

Punched in and punched out. Bodies crush rock, faces

Sweat-streaked with soot as

Lungs strain, hacking in

The chimneys’ light-dimming

Effluent, until the day the

Scrapheap irresistibly

Beckons This is what you are for

Is the lesson being taught and

Every 15 seconds or so

In an inserted frame, fractionally

Too long to be intended

As subliminal, a caption shows:

    Like a forecast of the cataclysmic terror

The fluid & rigid in parallel difference

Contents contained but the divisions

                                 being fucked with

Sparks fly like welding and

               the billowing towers of smoke.

DB Fishman, 2016

‘Male and Female’ (1942-3), Jackson Pollock, oil on canvas.

“You want to see me naked. And then you want to judge me for letting you see me naked.”

                                                           Belle Knox

Amber Amber Amber

Amber Amber Amber Amber

Actress            Contortionist

Circus freak    Star

Sister     Daughter

Equestrian          Aunt

Unfiltered      Unenhanced

Somebody            A body

Amber, whose biggest Hollywood credit

Was the nameless cheerleader

Girlfriend at the start of

Fast & Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.

Amber who discussed the

Fragility of her hair, due to

Recent cancer treatment at

The start of a BDSM scene.

Amber, who died worth

1.5 million dollars, and

They didn’t even put her

Own name in the headline

Unfeasible feats of physical

Performance and endurance

As we praise record-breaking

Superhuman Olympians.

On the frontline of sexuality

Sent by a nation’s need

With no regard for how that

Work works on a mind.

Like modern day saints down

On their knees to take the

Saint Sebastian arrows of all

Our directionless desire.

Amber, a woman who gave

So much of herself to

A world that could never

Acknowledge.