The Auld Enemy (last of four short poems)

               It's not so much that we

have long memories
as that it is still
happening to us.

A Course Of Action

Something must be done!
Something drastic, something
to assuage the bleak, black guilt
felt for all the whales, the dolphins
flown to their icarus suns,

for all the black babes in Africa
metamorphosed into
matchstick men by fat, white
market forces everywhere,

for all the blistered lungs,
the profitably powdered
living bone, the purple pulp
of the imploding, pulsing flesh
of peasants in three continents.

Something must be done.
Something personal to me,
and enraged symbology,
a protest with posters,
a suicidal leap perhaps
from a ground-floor window.

Me And Big Bine

Bine was big. BIG
and angry.
Not at specifics.
Fundamentally.
His very nature
was structured rage.

"Who ye laughin it?"
was all he asked me.

I had not laughed,
not cracked a smile,
not twitched a lip.

There was no reason
for his thumping me.

Stamping on my hands
was overkill.

I do not play piano
any more, or smile.
It is enough to type
one-finger poems
with my elbow.