Song of the Cockroach

unedited, devoid of proofreading, candid
first draft of Part 1 to a planned epic
tentatively titled "Song of the Cockroach"

I.
Fear not, you dumbly spinning mundane world
you profane knot gasping in space
entitled beyond your own dreams
slitting your own cheeks to swallow whole the egg
your fish-eyed men and mean pinch-faced women
your mud brains piled high with false worry
ignore the devils in your soft hands
and the teeth forgotten beneath your pillow

Fear not for your attempts at love,
love brutish and forced and pitiful and hurried
and bored

Fear not for your losing yourself
within another just as lost and ugly

Fear not your shit food or your shit food shit
splashing in latrines of holy water
your tight fist balled in unspeakable anger
unspoken because it has no brain
formless nasty anger
stealing drowning eating, proudly glaring
learning ways to die slower but never a way to live

Fear not for your impersonal secrets,
your secrets are shared by all

For I alone have secrets yet, I alone am burdened with monsters of passion and folly held close to my heart and these I bear happily towards my own sunlit rock

Fear not the loneliness that chills your skin
the same chill of your lover's breath
as he mutters beside you
both so utterly immobile and so

Fearful of words you may find
(your arms wrenched behind your back)
begging themselves to be spake

Fear not the truncheon pigs
horny stomping our littered streets
born only to smash the skulls
of the peasant boys who dart between your legs
like cockroaches stockpiling for the apocalypse

Fear not the songs of these same roaches
for theirs are secret songs
and if you were to know them of course
the hymnal would be inborn
Glad Hosannas not yours and so worthless

Fear not the gentle rot of all you once knew
and everything-to-know.

II.
Do you hear whispers in the dark?
whispers that are so envious of you
and of this final love you've found?
Fear not these whispers
for none should care so much,
you've invented these gossips on your own
while babbling faceless in a mirror
and shuddering that your love is finite
and impresses no one
and bitter is the love that is
nothing without the grounding that
one other may disapprove.

Fear not those whispers
they are only your own teeth shaking
your own absolution
no one cares so much as you

Fear not
for the whispers will cease
when your heart is a home to worms
and your skull a castle for the cockroaches
without the artist's palate to taste
oh how exquisite and important your pain must have been

III.
Fuck your fast food, fuck your online prescence, fuck your blame, fuck your crude attempts at fraternity, fuck your lidded eyes, fuck your baleful heart, fuck the wars you fight and the children you murder for the gas pedal you stomp and the gears you grind, fuck your art, fuck your god, fuck your gardens, fuck your boss and fuck their vapid patronizings, fuck your pets eating better than the Congolese, fuck your eyes-to-the-stars and your feet in their ruts, fuck your parents whose ruts you yet trod, fuck your zoos and nat'l parks, fuck your president and his bombs, fuck your laminated flaps of human skin worn dangling from rearview mirrors dripping blood from one disgusting city to the next as you cower in the trunk and let the armless molester take the wheel careening burning gasoline spraying splashed against tree trunks and your own flimsy celluloid eyelids and your teeth carved from cheap glass and your hair falling out in clumps and fuck you and die so that we may commence our feast.

IV.
The hero a mirror to his brother man
Where they lie putrid he is electric, vitriolic
His eyes so beautiful because of the poison
While they wither at their own bite
He would not judge them were they on their knees
But still insisting on walking proud
he judges freely

"How are you fueled by toxins?"
they too chickenshit to ask
tottering on their bleeding stumps

His teeth are perfectly sharp, the venom
drips milky from their tips
Each droplet a world, a secret
and when they fall, finally, the bellows of
their lungs cracking their pipette spines
and pleading,

"What is your secret, you who have borne
such venom, what runs in your veins,
surely not the crimson samestuff that weakly
trickled through our own, what secrets do
your cells carry?"

"Exactly so, exactly right" I gently whisper,
cradling their sad face, their smashed skull
and they believe to have died before hearing the answer.

Fear not!