The Occupiers Poem by Barry Van Asten

I

She keeps a warm place in her heart
Where the ghosts of children cry;
She has buried her principles in filled graves
And there she lets the secret lie.

The sordidness of life makes her sick
As she breathes the chemistry of the bed.
Lost in the preciousness of skin, she prays
For the resurrection of the dead.

In the evening's half-way light she sat,
Like an empty purse on the kitchen floor:
Useless, utterly useless, she cries
Between bashing her brains against the door.

There, in the dying of the old year,
Still directionless and dumb,
She cements the circles of her sex
In a broken line between thigh and thumb.

The love inside is dead, she said,
Let it's bug-eyed flame rest eternal.
And a crown of thorns between her legs
Still weeps for the Christ, maternal.

Seized in the white laughter of suspension,
A rhapsody of whispers calls her name,
And faces lie crumpled in the cushions
Where the experimental ape became

A carousel for Newton's physics;
A secret hid behind a door,
Committed in the name of science
And spread across the kitchen floor.

Her dry brain sips at cartomancy,
To turn the Lovers her heart yearned,
Yet in the extension of the grave,
Death was the only card she ever turned.

II

He says the need within him hammers
Obscene patterns on the pillows;
And in the folds of his cardigan - Niagara,
Wheezes through truncated bellows.

Why should he speak of the moonlight?
He knows its monster power sucks
Life from lemons and tobacco dust
And rips the bindings of his books.

He said his universe is upside down;
Pulled inside out about his home -
The minuscule smudge on the mantlepiece is
A little bit of Paris and a little bit of Rome.

With a broken heart and a broken throat,
Consonants and vowels were easily spread
Across the feared carpet inhabitants
And the old songs of the dead.

Like an ancient oak among the stones
His magpie sex was crucified.
With wicker bones and thorny thighs:
Here was Christ identified.

Smoking between secrets and astrology;
The long hours roar like pipes full of wind,
Where he is discharged by torchlight
Into the Manx-lipped wunderkind.

He is a bathroom grotesque
That stares through misty eyes of green
To see beyond the measure of skin
And the inch-thick waste that lies between.

He keeps a map of the world on his wall
Where he plots journeys near and far.
But he knows he'll never leave this cruel
Circumfrence that governs what we are.