[BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. Latvian born Andris Karklins is a poet and professional flamenco guitarist who has toured the world and recorded several albums. At the age of 5, he witnessed the brutal rape of his mother by Russian soldiers. In 1985, two days before her retirement, his mother was killed by his older brother who went psychotic after a week-long binge on pornography and hashish. The poem, Citizen, was written in 1971]. Ed.
We are not fed on the way to exile,
we eat bark. There is no meal time,
we forage along the stark route. To survive
we do not question anything any longer
as emigration begins. Our wide foreheads,
containing the still functioning brains,
welcome the acupuncture-like hailstones.
Our eyebrows are storm-clouds in the gangrene
turbulence of a migraine green sky.
Swallowed by immensity, we have lost the age of forbidden-by-word,
and gulp down the fist-epoch of barbed wire.
The contracting veins along our hoarse throats
are the last remnants that we have left behind,
in fantasy, the tolerant climate of protesting.
Our steps become crude rag-swaddled shuffles,
two fading stars in an unfortunate birth,
as the once expanding productive mind
is beaten with cuffs and gruff-loathing
until it retains only one verb vaguely linked
to an action: to live. Knowledge is forbidden.
Its book is closed. Torn out is the page on the man.
Our dehumanization began the moment we dropped
out from an unwed mother (as she is baptized here).
Truth was altered by introducing lie upon lie,
systematically, unceasingly, between the optic nerve and
the brain. Criminal law protected it. The only
human act that can be done is remove the cancer
or swiftly deliver us from deteriorating continuation.
Our gallows humor is snuffed out with boot kicks.
Our whispering, with rifle butts. We urinate
our pants for a minute of warmth and no longer
turn our eyes upward at migrating birds. Instead
our faces take the bruised disguise of moles
made to understand their misplacement above earth
contaminating organized nature with free thought.
Our last curses, fierce anti-prayers, give indigestion
as they sour in boiling intestines with no outlet
but to turn sadistically against one another.
Those good at beating are chosen as assistants
making brutality the mother; deprivation the midwife.
We, the emigrants, have left the country of mammals
and by increments are approaching the town of reptiles.
He murdered out of drunkenness.
I synthesized out of inherited facility.
You wrote out of genius. Three links
of chain binding us in a family tie,
the unifying umbilical chord of men,
who evolve into their own sense of law.
Removed now, painfully, to barren geography
to be defaced by organized bestiality
till rheumatism stalls ordered function
delivering in your arms (look at your arm!)
the inheritance of a pitiful wreck of your own,
once proud, life-keeping flesh medium: a mutilated
icy Pieta facing terror, the grotesque awareness,
as its temperature fluctuates below survival level.
At Christmas time we boil our clothes
free of blood-sucking vermin; huddled
among the putrid-steam of bubbling cauldrons
like black botches on the over-powering white.
At East time some chlorophyll returns. In vain.
We have become dumb to outside stimuli except
to mouth the blunt metal of loudspeaker words
while slaughtering whatever else remains alive.
We plaster sludge on us to combat flies
and summer mosquitoes. Yet they uncover cracks
to suck us ever drier. Skeletons and rags.
The first cold comes in August. By November
we dig graves in winter earth with axes;
eat raw mushrooms on the way. Diarrhea
is excuse to pause and rest. We hemorrhage
into sleep and are hammered out at 4.30 AM.
No one moans, they all die silently. Pity
is another rung torn out in a lowering abyss
that only uses negative mathematics, satanic chess,
to bring us ever closer to an even match
with the perfect citizen: The Minimal Man.
5. APPLICATION APPROVED
Ivan cut in his forehead last night:
HUMP YOUR MOTHER PARTY DOG. Infection set in.
He lost his sight, then his breathing. The guards
roared loudly, taking his body application
to be filed away. Happily he lies now in the humus
gone on vacation from Reptile Town to Mineral City.
They closed his case: REHABILITATION COMPLETED.
Ivan, when the July thunderstorms charge
the air with rampant electricity,
when the woods are moist and rot is accentuated,
I see your tender eyes in phosphorescent hideousness
and recall too well our stolen conversations, our
begetting new chapters, with our dream talk beyond
the single page of existence allowed us.
Ivan, I would have loved your skinny body,
planted the scentless white parasitical orchid
of masculinity, had I had a thimbleful of sperm
to stress that there remained in us rebellion . . .
That once we were given the law of birth, regardless,
we had the right of the law of life: chainless!
Yes, Ivan. Systems are easier to replace than lives.
Ivan, who made his body his message.
Thus draining the last possible doubt in us all
that we can only be beaten down to hatred
from where it is an imbecile's step to Minimal Man,
the faceless heavy citizen, that resembles you now:
a clod of earth, putrefied. Ivan, you cheated!
No one forgives nor recognizes your new citizenship.
THE END