Robert Verdon, #203, Lines Towards a Poem, or, Globalisation

Who says organization says oligarchy.

— Robert Michels, Political Parties, 1911.

my jaundiced mind is your meniscus

its igloo light grades highroads through the hill-fog

its tall waves skyscraper in mid-ocean

I am a red raindrop on the razor-wire

I am the squeal of hard tyres as they speed away

I am the profitable despair of the multitude

the Southern Cross is my silver campfire

its beams probe its seaward shoals

its twisted estuary tastes like mulligan stew

tapers burn in my empty chapel

the caw of the raven is cut out of coal

my breath is naphtha, fatal as courage

lazy flies speck my bulbous horizon

wicker forests march down to my trickle

the Iron Pillar bulks rustless in my sapience

just-snuffed gas mantles announce the dawn

on the net I buy sunglasses for the midnight sun

I steal charcoal pencils and cartridge paper coffins

millions of gadgets have come aboard

which blind with hope you cannot afford

the captain has fitted the bridge with a diving mask

my hair is the hue of caramelised onion

the day is here with a gyre of plastic donkeys

Jack and Jill stop tumbling for vinegar and brown paper

a phalanx of fires roasts my victory along the ridge-pole

I have rolled a Dodge on a smoky country road

never again will I be defeated

skyscrapers wave or drown in mid-ocean

the cities have each borne a bony bairn

wild car-horns signal networks on my Möbius twist

plunder and palaces, a house of golden cards

magnificent as a revenant Babylon

dining on fresh, boiled Child

my nation has gone down the river forever

dissolved in efficiency, distilled by my hierarchy

I am the new panopticon of freedom

on misery hill they are having a party

bankers and their robber-robots gavotte

in the interstices my molecules are rising

cry for your children

for they are not