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Slaughterhouse


The lens the only way out,
a tiny round cylinder of glass
from which the world gulps down
its daily shot of acrimony,
drags the viewer,
a refugee from reality,
by the heart
through the grief-struck crowds,
riding the stooped shoulders
of terror-struck hours
in which murderers and rapists
bloodied the end of a century,
soiled slaughterhouse floor
stinking of blood and excrement,
leaped over the fallen limp bodies,
where the revolution of hate
spirals darkest,
smacks the world's bottom,
beats a skull like a drum,
before screams of a candybar commercial
interrupt. The sweet voice
of a chewing gum jingle
trembles up from the dead baby.
And the weeping mother
like a broken clock
suddenly bursts with alarm,
disturbs the quiet of a sleepy London street.
Everything gently passes
through the lens, cities, towns,
crowds of dirty-faced refugees,
wagons, dead bodies, all tugged,
jerked through as though
food digested by a beast,
washed of its sins, blessed, cursed
and cured, races blithely
toward its rightful hiding place
beneath the earth,
along with the other sewage.

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