On Destruction
2021 - Ongoing
In response to Israel’s apartheid, occupation, genocide, ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Palestinians.
Dates of each part correspond to when they were written.
ONE
May 2021
It resumes again,
Bloodlust let loose—
Something hellish in the halls of history,
A corruption of the soul which violence begets—
Know it as a sickness, contagious as death,
Comes to each of us in time:
The desire to destroy it all,
That life might be made easier,
That the Other might leave us alone,
If it were destroyed,
Just as a mosquito is,
With a swat of the palm,
With instant and total violence,
The nuisance of its insistent hum
That it is as real as you
Vanquished in a moment,
Leaving you dominant again
In your blood-soaked solitude—
I want all to have belonging,
Down even to the ants who find a route through the window to the bathroom sink
And who I wash
With too little hesitation
Down the drain,
To the baby birds who litter these spring sidewalks,
Broken and fallen from precarious nests—
I want all to have belonging,
Even those desolate and dark in the soul,
Who structure their lives around destruction
Because they are destroyed inside—
I want all to have belonging,
For the world to collapse into the kind of peace
Which only timelessness grants—
Because to live is to become brutalized
I think—
*
Wide dark sky,
terror inside,
night cracked and split,
broken by burn and roar—
The world ends, again and again,
In a million places, in a million moments,
A million worlds end in each of a million moments,
Today and today,
And yesterday too, forever in time,
All for what—
Time is all the ending of the world,
Rehearsed and performed
To slake the endless yearning
Of brutal and brutalized unbelonging—
The world ends,
Again and again,
Forever,
At human hands—
All for myth,
All for belonging,
All for the fascism of isolate belonging,
Supremacy of holy and chosen belonging—
*
Beneath it all faithless land judge of nothing
And forever time impartial
Carrying every world
Ended and ending,
Faithless judgeless forever time
Carries you forever home—
Home forever
Forever home
Home forever
Forever home.
TWO
October 11th 2023
The bloodlust is loose again,
The imperial derangement.
Such brokenness now,
The world struggles to hold it,
The soul surely cannot,
The bounds are broken
Nihilism spills across us
Like hot coffee across the counter
Poured by the hungover early riser
Who falls asleep standing up
Doesn’t know to stop pouring,
That it has all long been too much,
For any container,
For any frame.
Our bureaucrat kings
Live in palaces atop mountains
Waking to vistas of the world entire
And look only at the ground below their feet
And think in flooded caves
And dream in funhouses of darkness and blood.
I live in the evening lands.
The Western empire died a few years ago,
The Western empire will never die.
I live in the evening lands.
Dementia unlocks in some an endless rage
And drops the filters on violence,
Like alcohol, or cocaine, or steroids, or love,
Or terminal diagnoses.
You become afraid of what you have lost,
And are losing,
And all that never came to be–
(all those dreams, all that longing… so much longing…
so much longing…
longing
longing
longing
don’t we live and break for longing--)
You have to hope you do not live
Inside the home of one in such a state.
We live in the evening lands.
I hope there is a moral reckoning,
somewhere,
someday.
I hope those who love only themselves in this life
Someday are asked by the terminal accountant
How they distributed their love, and why.
I hope the question makes them silent, and afraid.
I hope they are broken by unhealable regret and grief.
I hope the suffering of those they ignored in this life
Fills their souls then for all their lives to come.
We live in the evening lands,
Where evil is a problem not of morality
But of competency.
We live in the evening lands,
Where the suffering you cause is irrelevant,
And all that matters is whether you get away with it.
If you do, you will be a god, and you will rule us too.
We live in the evening lands,
Where our kings laugh and
Spear for sport
The side of Jesus.
Someday here, as on Golgotha,
I hope that
Our sky too
Will darken
And the curtain of our temple
Will also
Be torn
In two
someday
THREE
May 3rd 2024
“Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods.”
— Jared Kushner. Interview at Harvard’s Middle East Initiative, Feb. 15, 2024.
These are the war-games,
the wet-dreams of the few,
them killers,
them Potomac-bound.
*
See, there, on the horizon, a glow?
It’s the radiant future,
just play our cards right.
And yes the evening winds carry the smell of burning hair and well-done flesh
Over to our terrace
Overpowering somewhat
The rich full body of the old Bordeaux,
But heroes make sacrifices, my dear,
And this is how history is made,
And how we will rule
For one thousand years.
Drink up, my love.
Here is to glory.
And if they resist?
Tell them work makes you free—
*
Sometimes,
On quiet days,
In quiet rooms,
On silent nights,
When the mind is loosed
And the soul roams,
The universal ancient in you
Is summoned to the council of all ghosts.
Their language is silence,
Their tongues are gaze.
What words for them?
The sum of you is witnessed
Always and in the end
By the dead
By the dead.
When there is nowhere to hide
And nobody to deceive
And nowhere to run
And nothing to destroy
And accounting is made
By every ghost
Will you feel afraid?
This is where all souls end.
*
They will enter Rafah soon.