5. Excuses
O nitwit body, how could you ever have lost
(as one might drop something in the street) your strength,
your paradisal face? When you had them
you acted ugly enough - now you ve grown ugly
better make at least your actions beautiful.
Your back is pale as winter. Once a peacock,
now a porcupine. If that beauty had really
meant something, it would never change, would it?
It only came on loan, it s been repossessed.
Ah corpus indelectable, don t weep, don t moan,
frail scallop on life s plumbless sea, brief breeze,
thin sail. Like a slick perfume salesman
(snotty and sexy) for a while you drenched your hair
in hyacinth and ambergris. Those hyacinthine locks
look now like frayed ropes, which you weave
upon Death s spindle. Yesterday fell
through a hole in your pocket, long before
you managed to get hold of tomorrow.
Tomorrow you ll pluck the bitter roses sown
- was it only yesterday? Fifty years from
cradle to grave along this ghoulhaunted highway:
the poor travel no worse than the rich -
no first-class compartment for Muslim or Jew.
However, there does come a fork in the road
- one way to heaven, one to hell. Fire
burnt in your gut and singed your heart
and offered you an excuse to tear up
the scroll of religion. Slave of instinct,
worshipper of fire (like a Magi) you whine
I don t know nothin , I didn t do it . . .
and really how could you be considered guilty
of your own murder? The ignoramus, devoid
of worship and devotion, expects to find in paradise
only good huntin and good fishin. You yourself
are fit - ugly devil - only to be bagged
gutted, hunted and roasted. O PROOF OF KHORASAN
the noise you make reaches every corner
of the earth, as if a boulder dropped
from heaven and shattered this great bowl
to splinters.
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