The Culture continued (poem)

 

 

 

The Culture II

 

The Kreutz Sungrazer

Should it return

Centuries ahead

 

Trail its vapor of ammonia

Methane

Carbon

The devil’s alloy

Nickel-plated offerings

 

Commodify your tears

Make your work efficient

Import your tears in boxcars

Be done with it

A question harms you

A word destroys you

Step from the shadows

We will hear your voice

No?

Then hear mine

 

Pearls to swine

Cede to the shakedown

Know yourself, protect yourself

Donate early and often

To the community coffers

 

Pull down the rafters

Pry up the shingles

Break the foundation

Menace with symbols

 

Your roadblocking

Your smoldering debris

May burn like lime

But the times

Have your back to the ledge

You hold

Within a shaking hand

Your fortune told

Doomed to wander, or to linger

Once the card is drawn

 

Your pyramid is the inverse

Topweight crushes the future

Leverage, secrets, access

Entrée to other classes

 

 

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The Culture: Prurience

 

Entrée

High-pitched and shrill

Take notice, be alert

Be furtive, surreptitious

Come out of your hiding place

 

Make overtures, besiege, beset, bedevil

You bear a close resemblance

Today’s project

Is your own desire

 

You feel an unreasonable emotion

An unwanted preoccupation

Akin to stealing

You play a traveling game of pursuit

Sidling, confiding private matters

 

This intolerable passion

This disordered invention

This fulfilled wish

You have a political character

An organized policy

The power to sway

You’re inflamed, excited, fearmongering, obsessed

Talk around, talk about

On the rooftops, in the hallways

Talk it over, talk it out

In the gutters and the alleyways

Eyepopping, nodding, hand-waving, humiliating

Slippery, oily, through side doors and backdoors

Silence and darkness

Clutching

Unyielding, unapologetic, intractable

 

You’re a victim

The unfair scrutiny

The world’s cruelty

The life blood

The backbone

The veins and arteries

The fortress stones

The den of righteousness

The good people

 

 

 

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The Culture

Purpose No Secret

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2014, Stephanie Foster)