'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam <br /> <br />On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind <br />The light drifts like dust over faces <br />We wear masks on our genitals <br />You've heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews <br />History is made of bricks you can't go through it <br />And bricks are made of bones and blood and <br />Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through <br />Except a piano with rabies <br />Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds <br />Vietnamese Cuban African bloods <br />Constellations of sperm upon our bodies <br />Drunk as dogs before our sons <br />The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough <br />Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano <br />The air over Chicago is death's monogram <br />This is the Were-Age rushing past <br />Speed: 10,000 men per minute <br />This is the species bred of death <br />The manshriek of flesh <br />The lifeless sparks of flesh <br /> <br />Covering the deep drums of vision <br />O new era race-wars jugular-lightning <br />Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future <br />Know we are not the smilelines of dreams <br />Nor the pores of the Invisible <br />Piano with rabies we are victorious over <br />The drum and the wind-chime <br />We bite back a voice that might have emerged <br />To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes<br /><br />Bill Knott<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poem-chicago/
