The engine is killing the track, the track is silver, <br />It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless. <br /> <br />Its running is useless. <br />At nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields, <br /> <br />Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs, <br />Swaying slightly in their thick suits, <br /> <br />White towers of Smithfield ahead, <br />Fat haunches and blood on their minds. <br /> <br />There is no mercy in the glitter of cleavers, <br />The butcher's guillotine that whispers: 'How's this, how's this?' <br /> <br />In the bowl the hare is aborted, <br />Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice, <br /> <br />Flayed of fur and humanity. <br />Let us eat it like Plato's afterbirth, <br /> <br />Let us eat it like Christ. <br />These are the people that were important ---- <br /> <br />Their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces <br />On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake. <br /> <br />Shall the hood of the cobra appall me ---- <br />The loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains <br /> <br />Through which the sky eternally threads itself? <br />The world is blood-hot and personal <br /> <br />Dawn says, with its blood-flush. <br />There is no terminus, only suitcases <br /> <br />Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit <br />Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes, <br /> <br />Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. <br />I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms. <br /> <br />And in truth it is terrible, <br />Multiplied in the eyes of the flies. <br /> <br />They buzz like blue children <br />In nets of the infinite, <br /> <br />Roped in at the end by the one <br />Death with its many sticks.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/totem/
