Irises

THE ZOO

The door opens to a deafening din,
and devoured by darkness
we're plunged inside the bowels
of another primate building.

Behind the clear plastic panes,
in a series of rectangular concrete rooms,
are artificially recreated environments,
where, different varieties of bipeds
variously respond
to the obscenity of fate:

some sit and masturbate,
and others perseverate,
and others rage across their cages,
and some play by fits and starts
until either tired or bored they stop,
and some hold each other,
and still others sit and stare back
at the others staring back at them staring...

Their weeks are all the same
sanctified by little sacred routines;
the cleaning of the cages,
the retiring to their rooms,
the endless stream of visitors:
some scratch themselves,
some eat, some pick their noses
some point, some play,
some hold each other.
and some like me, just stare;
the meals that have all been tasted before,
and the vast abyss of time
filled by empty shadows.

Stepping outside, I'm blinded by the light;
which, just like absolute darkness,
my eyes are not made to be able to see.
Its so painfully bright that I crave
a quiet place with adumbrated shadows.
I hate visiting the zoo!

SHE BUYS SUCH SMALL THINGS

She buys such small things
little costumes and tiny shoes
and diapers, not the prefabricated ones
with twice as absorbent lining,
but the old fashioned soft cloth ones.
I carry the packages.
They come from the depths of our souls,
unpacked and put away they patiently wait.

Soft as twilight, you'll come into the World:
this Summer fanatics have made human sacrifices
for you and all the other dear little ones like you.
For nine months your mother's belly has ripened
swelling 'till it looks like a planet
perfectly round, perfectly smooth.

Soft down of your mother's womb,
in wonder I've watched and felt
as you've restively stirred in your World of dreams.
It doesn't have sanctified murders,
virtual reality rapists
and informant temple whores;
where, flesh of my seed, you sleep
so pure and innocent dreaming your own dreams.

Little gay colored clothes!
You look at them
through your own dark, earnest eyes
that look like mine
your smile though, its all your mothers,
imagining that this is to be all your dream....

THEY SAY

They say that Joe McCarthy
was a straight and honest man,
with his record as a war vet
and the steady job he held in town.

He was the perfect employee,
at the local hardware store;
why he'd never even gotten a ticket,
while driving in his car.

Imagine a quiet kind of neighbor
a real nice family man,
an asset to the community
who'd been living there for years.

It came as quite a shock to me,
when in the paper I read,
how he followed his daughter to a restaurant
and put a bullet through her acquaintance's head.

It seemed, she'd tried to help sell some marijuana
to the man and that he somehow was ripped off;
he then had become very angry,
and tried and tried to get his money back.

Joe had his daughter arrange a meeting
to try to reason things out;
that's when the cold blooded murder
was brutally carried out.

A grand jury let him go, though,
and this is what they said,
he merely tried to protect his daughter,
and he thought he had no other choice.

A few unanswered questions
are left hanging in the air:
how could a hardware clerk know how to handle things
and know just what to say, to produce a perfect alibi?

Is it reasonable for such a man, untrained in law and on
his own,to deliberately set up and murder someone in
broad daylight and in a public place this way? If it
is extremely improbable, then who helped him? And wouldn't
they, then, be accomplices too?

If he had help, wouldn't he have had time to consider
other alternatives, like getting a court restraining order,
which means he clearly had another choice!?
There was one other item that somehow got overlooked.

How can a man, who has come unarmed
to "reason things out", be perceived a dangerous threat;
one that has to be killed, and that there is no other choice?
Please, someone help me figure this all out.

It makes me feel small and ashamed
that "my country tis of thee
sweet land of liberty" has gone the way
of other right wing totalitarian states, complete with goons,
informants and death squads.

REMEMBER

A man came to my home
and spoke of the beautiful gardens
people always speak of my home
as the house with the beautiful gardens,
in early Spring it explodes with daffodils
with crocuses and with snowdrops,
such a small beautiful house
with wells of cool shade
and children almost grown.

Can you see it
drowned in sunshine
glistening blue.

I live in the suburbs of Portland
with its concrete canyons
picturesque rivers and tall trees:
where we were free
just to be- do you remember?

The voices of honest people frank and friendly,
not steeped in deceit;
parks in the suburbs
with fountains and proud serious statues
pointing the way we had come from:
glittering spoons, and recondite smoke
discretely curling in fantastic forms around the shrubbery,
a phantasmagoric of hips and lips
voices tumbling joyfully out to the street,
life vibrant quintessence complacent
among textures of green
and bright immaculate cars,
where blue sat on its haunches and
dull blades rusted; ripe fruit
peeled with laughter while rolling
down by the murmuring rivers.

The Willamette valley's recumbent body
can still be seen stretching out to the hills'
embrace verdant, voluptuous
like a sea of green.

A man came to my home
(He was sent by whom?)
to talk of war, religion and God,
but the crowd that he brought
along shouted him down.

When I asked who they all where
he curiously glanced around,
but he couldn't see any of them
and gave me a funny look.
He had come with his crowd
of delusions in order to deceive.
I sent them all packing.

Now, I lay here racked with pain
fulfilling the poet's compulsion,
to christen reality with verbal expressions;
I will tell how it is with me,
pausing first to listen
while the rhododendrons
whisper their metaphysics
to the passing breeze.

Remember the long months
when rain battered the indifferent ground
with its syllables till flowers blossomed everywhere.

Till one day, in sight of you,
I saw Amerika turncoat fascist;
which means a lack of intellectual freedom
a strong militaristic bent
and repressive social control
coupled with perverse faiths,
displaced public institutions, coercion:
the antithesis of freedom
and equitable treatment
that outward form of government and system of justice
they had at least pretended to be before.

I saw church and state
enslave the great mass of people
and watched while churches
where used and abused as pawns
to help usher the populace
into a social order of ignorance
and subsersevience to a system,
which promises everything to a few
and nothing for the majority-
all done for the best emotional excuse of course:
for the children!

Since then everything emptied
the streets where deserted
the parks haunted with predatory eyes
stalking and devouring
until all became one big living lie;
since then, only darkness,
since then, the blood and bombs,
ever since then sadistic torture
for their pleasure.

Rapists in buildings in front
of teleporting-virtual-reality-machines,
sanctified housebreakers and prostitutes
on Sundays saying amen,
coming out of their darkness
to destroy those who decent:

the blood of children was seen on rabble,
it took no effort to get someone else to put it there,
come see the prostituted children,
come see children beaten and cheated,
come see children abused,
come see their new version of a passion play.

As I sit now, I see
America expiring
under the weight of oppression,
self-serving miscreants,
well intending dupes,
see the death that stalks the land,
observe the mutilations;
the chaos created for factional gain,
the smoldering ruins in place of rights-
out of the carnage
of America emerges...
out of the the murder of children emerges...
out of the prostitution of children emerges...

technologies that are spawned
that one day will be a bullet
striking your hearts and
chains shackling your souls!

NEAR

See my pale flesh:
whiter than the full moon
wrapped in a thin veil of clouds;
whiter than the winter's
first flakes of snow;
and, whiter than luminous pearls
when first pulled from the sea.

Hear the sound of my bell.
Its melody is more lovely
than the song birds of Spring.
It keeps me company,
as I travel alone,
down this long and hard road.

Oh sound so pure
calling out your warning
you softly settle on me,
like the road's dust or night's dew-
Beware, a leper is near!

WHOSE DREAMS OF MADNESS

Whose dreams of madness drove you to despair?
Who was the radical-right-wing-whore
who said she respected you, and then stole your man.
Who told the police you claimed you would never
be taken alive and had a gun:
O.J. Simpson all over again, the tragic triangle in reverse
and you "virtually" driven into a rage
that carried you over the precipices edge,
one more of the red tide of gunned down carnage;
while, she who slept with and helped
the known criminal with outstanding warrants:
was never even charged
with aiding and abetting a known felon!
Earth, the heavenly bodies are weeping for you
their sister, richest in sorrows
among the beauty of heaven.
You whose sweet singing
has turned into a death scream
among the chorus of galaxies.

Whose secret cravings of death
dressed in red vestments glance needles
in the shattered mirror.
Mother Earth blinded by gold,
how could the person have known,
who hollered "its a gas fire";
when the firemen came, anyone with a gas fireplace
knows gas fires don't smell, and the preceding explosion
came from a sealed basement,
an explosion so huge it ripped off the front porch?
How did they know a gun with a string
tied to the trigger ran up three floors
to where a man sat "virtually" driven
into such a state of depression
that he pulled the string that blew everything up,
and started the raging inferno
that plunged him into the ocean of death.
Explain to me how they knew the front door was booby trapped.
Is it standard procedure never to try
to enter a burning building by the front door?
How did they "immediately " know that the man, a workaholic,
had quit his business one month before-
if he had not been subject to illegal electronic surveillance:
by guess who?

HERE BENEATH THE LATIN SKY

Here beneath the Latin sky,
I speak a bitter truth:
the blood that courses through our veins
is ancient as the mountains, the maize, the wine.

How long ago did we lose, dear God,
our heritage of antiquity - our identity, our independence.
Where has our tyranny always come from, if not the North,
where is it taking us now?

We have seen, in beautiful Northern Mexico,
where red deserts meet azure skies, contrived gang wars.
We have seen, in lovely Haiti, where the blue skies meet blue
seas,
once again gang wars used to kill off certain people!

Knowing all this has cost me
interminable moments of sorrow,
as the factional interests of the radical right
continue their ruthless international politics of terror.

CHILDREN OF CAIN

We have a simple mission:
we will squeeze the triggers, slip the bribes into the greasy
palms,
and deceive the people,
we will encourage all types of sin.

And when we become older we will experience redemption,
avert our eyes blinded by custom, sprinkle sacrificial blood,
and feel the joyous rapture of salvation
dangling, in golden crosses, adorning our breasts.

And when we finally stop our sacrileges,
like some mesmerized mob
that awakes appalled and ashamed,
to the emptiness of eternity.

Then, and only then will we realize
how utterly superfluous life is,
what an insignificant fleeting instant all our dreams are
littered with the dead children, the dead fathers, the dead
mothers.

AGONY

Mute agony lidless red eye of a hostile planet,
silence is where your name once was.
Searing pain of your splintered door frame,
doorway a gaping hole,
with the sagging door a broken jaw.
Your shattered sleep,
your vanished voice,
the bleeding minutes that measure
what's left of your life,
of a brutally crushed existence,
reverberating in my skull
a pale vision
whose lips are peeling back
in a hideous grin.
Explosive agony at the end of your days,
before a splattered wall,
below the reeling night sky
filled with infinite yearing:
fleeting life, whose only significance comes from dying,
what bitter-sweetness death will be
after witnessing all of this.

If you are interested in any other poems by the author or would like to constructively comment on any of the poems presented here please contact me at my e-mail address:chuang_tzu@hotmail.com in the meantime. This page hosted by
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