Tiny Earthquakes

Playing cards whirl in the autumn wind.
Embedded fossils hoard their primal capture
In pockmarked suburban facades.
Strangers ooze automatic venom,
Squint through windows they long to smash,
And watch the evening fall on television.

The physics of history entraps us
In action and reaction,
Wars, earthquakes and avalanches
Occurring with similar patterns,
The tiniest actions reverberating
With immense unforeseeable results.

(And,for my next trick,
I might catch kuru
And turn into a cannibal,
Giggling myself to death).

Oh me and my wonderful career:
To swallow the mercury of irksome labour
And scrape like a mouse in the wainscot
Of the moneymaker’s lair…
To handle the excrement of money
And lose the happy leisure soul demands,
The vagabondage dear to human growth.
Economic conscripts, we parade and march
To the drum, and shine our caps and buttons
Till the cannon cut us down…
Bile’s quicklime sears the gullet,
As I make neat piles of ash, day by day,
And pray for a minor promotion, a little more cash.

I sit and practise my card tricks:
Four Burglars,
Invisible Deck,
The Acme of Control.
This viciousness within me
Revels in cruelty and assault,
Apt to torture and flay any foe
For the least slight.

Petrus Ramus,after fifty books on logic,
Was murdered in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,
His fine blackbearded head lopped off
And tossed into the Seine.