Plots of Meat in Meter: Five Conspiratorial Verses

Opened and red, opened and red,

rape and depravity, slaughter and dread!

Here comes Mahogany, haunter of sleep,

Son of the Fathers who lurk in the deep,

voices like clay as they mewl to be fed.

Shaven and bled, hanging like beef,

death in the subway comes worse than a thief.

Knife versus cleaver, a primitive fight,

fought as the train thunders blind through the night.

Learn that the city’s a cannibal fief.

Awe and belief, older than sin.

Worship of something too foul to wear skin.

New York, I love you, indifferent whore,

plastered with miracles, painted with gore.

Tear out my tongue, wake me up with a grin.

Let it begin. No more to say.

Serving in silence, the corporate way.

Fuck your opinions, “no comment”’s the rule.

History flows in the blood that I drool.

Sunlight in dust—it’s a beautiful day.

Dracula dust on the butcher-shop floor

fed by the carcasses hung from the ceiling,

oozing coagulants richly congealing,

naked as newborns and gravid with gore.

Cleaver chops chunks and the grease paper wraps them,

swaddling the meat in its crackling slickness,

bundled like babies struck voiceless by sickness,

breathless however the butcher’s hand slaps them.

Mothers with pushchairs line up to receive them,

hiding them quickly before you can see

just what their shopping might grow up to be.

Butchers tell stories—but never believe them.

The door is shut.

The air is still.

The Secret breathes the silence.

The door is locked.

The air is stale.

The Secret stirs the dust.

The door is bricked.

The air is dead.

The Secret snuffles corners.

The door is wall.

The air is poison.

The Secret scratches names.

Your name is there, with mine.

The Secret has them.

The Secret holds them.

The Secret keeps us.

In nicotine corridors, crumpled like cartons, we lie.

This one’s a Government lawyer and this one’s a spy.

Here’s where we come when we’ve finished our lives but can’t die.

Down from the walls peer the Ministers’ portraits, which see

life after death in the laps of the Powers That Be,

lost in the schemes that the Treasury wouldn’t agree.

History hunches in files; its events have congealed

into the phrases by which their effect was concealed;

we are the wax with which secrecy’s orders were sealed.

Corridors, offices—tossed in the corners, we wait,

mutely expressing the dream of the Self-Preserved State,

living the deaths that its cautious injunctions dictate.

Out in the world you must live by the laws that we made;

none of us dies till the inks of the statute books fade—

Government ghosts from the grave of the taxes you paid.

In Clothes for Men the men for clothes stand staring

at nothing as you press against the glass

and try to peer beneath the suits they’re wearing.

The moving people swing their legs and pass.

The undertakers’ waits across the street.

Some men are made of plastic, some of meat.

That plastic skin—it looks as if it’s peeling

beneath the kind of cloth you can’t afford.

That hidden heart, you wonder what it’s feeling

when shirt-cuffed hand is rigor mortis clawed.

Behind your back the world is walking by.

The undertakers wait for you to die.

You hurry off—a boy may be forgiving

if merchants find new uses for the dead;

but now you must go walking with the living,

and watch for signs of life, and see instead

the painted eyes, the movements stiffly spastic,

and learn to say your name with lips of plastic.