The days roll by
The pitfalls pile high,
The child in you slowly dies
Replaced, bit by bit,
By a calculating man.

Cold logic's what you said you'd need
To have your happy guarantee,
To avoid the sucking flying leeches,
The ones that seek the furthest reaches.

The snakes that lick and suck your soul,
Ounce by ounce as you grow old,
Then wither, die, and crisply blow
Along the shoulder of the road.

Lot you can say about a child;
Ignorant, crazy, running wild
In a green backyard with matchbox cars
In the imaginary neighborhood.

Building things that don't exist
In places that have no place,
Gazing up in thoughtspace air
Watching what you can't see there.

Dreaming great and thundery things,
Crashing vast imaginings,
Newer worlds, vast and deep,
In gentle turns of careless sleep.
 

—Adult life is a life of lists:
On paper, and the heeling that persists
'Til all the tiny passengers
Slip into the icy drink.

Chased down the deck by Ahab Queeg
(Brought up in the finest schools),
Alerted to the subtle fools
Lollygagging on the afterdeck.

Floating with the snakes
Gnarled swizzle sticks
A hundred babies, and they all
Go out with the bathwater.

Experts line the paper pages;
Published daily, fears and rages!
To help compile laundry lists
For fear and drama catechists.

Lots of seekers, a lot of minds...
Latch onto whatever you think you find.
Whichever rock in a sea of doubts,
Whatever staid in a lake of louts.

Experts on the rules we knew,
Wise to what you really should do
Wise to things you really should know
Wise to who you really should screw.

In the end, turns out the straight and narrow—
The straight and narrow flaming arrow,
To immolate your only house
In a lake of polite and heatless fire.
 

Then the antibodies descend like whipmasters
And flay everything alive!

The Tarmasters are making the rounds again.
The Broommasters pushing it through the world.
Meringue ideas, ivory towers,
Go up, new corporate flags unfurl.

Not to wave from a baby's fist,
But the flock to get the gist.
The salesman take off a-lying,
And the children lay down a-dying.

Join the group, take your check,
Smile at the boss, the watercooler,
Free coffee, creamer, fluorescent sex,
Colonies of clicking green insects.

Law and order in your mind,
Barefoot cops sit back and unwind.
Punch and Judy on TV
You drawn bedroom curtains steamy.

Stand the children up in rows,
And shoot them down to death.
Suck in ideology
With every grasping breath.

Consecrate your soul in fonts of sperm,
Milky white albino worms...
Spew your wrath in newsprint fire...
Purge your soul on the fields of ire...

Make your powerful friends...
Burn the blasphemous evidence.
Lock the scratching bones way up tight...
Turn off the closet light.

Drown the children in a lake of dark...
Stuff them in culverts in the city park...
Dig long ditches alongside the playgrounds...
Pave their corpses over on the highways...

(I should have been a pair of auto tires
Tearing across the lanes of wide freeways)
 

No more the screaming brats
In echoing vaults inside your head—
Replaced by frowning sallow priests
Murmuring canticles to the dead.

Men in suits and ties...
Bill collectors gaze with eyes
Full of flies,
That lay their maggots gently in you.

To blindly squirm
And stuff the chambers of your heart,
To fill your braincase
And eat all your art.

My body's filled with singing lights,
Eclipsed by smudge and smoke—
Somebody, please, anybody, sell me
The solvent.

Inside a child
Opened sleepy eyes
And smiled.
Not really dead after all
Roused by a clean white kiss;

The Resurrectors make the rounds...

A firelight flashes in the hills,
And the varmints slink back into their dens.
As we whipmaster the wills
Of a hundred whens.

Perhaps if we screw and screw
Over and over again,
Maybe squirming white babies
Will be born again into our midst.

Baby bottles filled with acid,
They'll spray the worms and maggots,
Laughing insanely, the cackle
That only a baby can do.

Rise up on their back legs
And stroke their bald heads,
Slip on new crowns
And congregate behind flags and pennants.

The Neo-Baby Invasion!
The Resurrectors laugh and chant —
Stillborn in the womb,
A million Neo-Sycophants.

If I could, I would give birth
To a red new baby a day.
Pat it, powder it, diaper its ass
And send it on its way.

Crawling with a message of joy
Past hoary heads in cubicles
Past stuffed shirts in conference rooms
Past politicos locked in shirtsleeve tombs...

And everyone staring blankly over
The rim of the porcelain trough, moreover,
Mouthrims wet and smudged, and chins
Dripping with filth and poison gore.

Because until we sodomize their heads with fear,
And gorge them on pitfalls
Through the years,
They're children sleeping still and clear...