Explosion
Your
lips taste like cordite
in
my mouth.
Your
scent burns my skin
like
cleansing napalm.
In
the end, the cords of your touch
will
bind me like the wires
of
a backpack bomb.
YEAH.
THIS MIGHT BE A BIT TOO MUCH, graphics-wise*. I wrote this some years ago
following a suicide bombing in an Indonesian restaurant where a number of
people were murdered who had been silly enough to take their families out to
dinner. Praise____________! [Insert the name of your god, progenitor,
organization, team or blamer-in-chief here.]
Why
I equated this horribly trendy bit of violence with sexuality is a question I
will ask my psychiatrist. Seriously, the (and yet I can’t quite use the word senseless**) violence of terrorism that
is on so many of our minds these days needed a response, some kind of
counterpoise, some opposite grounded in the human body, in our guts, to throw back in the exploding faces of individuals
who choose to follow such a dark path. Well, heck folks, sex is about
the most powerful thing going on the planet when you think about it (volcanoes
and plate tectonics notwithstanding). So along with the trillions of critters—micro-and-macroscopic—who
get it on (sorry for the 1970s, chukka-chukka wow! reference), I thought, “hey, sex sounds good, and it's better than viscera-covered
walls.” So this short, violent poem is my way of co-opting the death-affirming choices of suicide
bombers. (Question: Where are their farm teams? Can we not send out recruiters
and get a few to come over to our team? Perhaps they can be put to more
productive work such as de-mining places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia, Laos, Angola and Bosnia-Herzegovina, to name a few. Perhaps they can blow themselves up AND clear a
farmer’s field of pesky landmines at the same time; that’s a win-win in my book.
I'm sure I will have more to say on
militarism, weapons manufacturing, nuclear arms, asymmetric warfare, etc. in later posts because these things
just piss me off.
But for here and for now, the poem's image is of sex
as dangerous, explosive, but the danger and volatility are life affirming. We have, in a sense, ‘bombs
of life’ waiting to explode inside us. We’re born, we grow, we flower and
then ‘explode’ in a rush of procreation and life. Sigh…
Sex,
from zygotes to zeitgeist, defines us and makes us who we are, whether we like
it or not. Of
course, sex can be used for the vilest purposes, but it's the fundamental urge we
share with 99% of the lifeforms on this planet. I can’t help but think of it as
good and wonderful. And we have the great privilege of adding
beautiful things to go along with it. Perhaps we’re not the only critters who get warm fuzzies when the object of their love comes into the room (or nest or
cave.) If elephants can cry over their dead, I would guess they can
also feel love. So there, ISIS! Sex AND
love!
I sketched the image of the woman
some years before I wrote the poem. The photo image of the
“suicide bomber cam” I did shortly after the Indonesian bombing. Bombs
and bombers are nothing new. They did it in
Russia and England, and Europe in the late nineteenth century;
Suffragettes planted bombs in London mail boxes during the early twentieth century;
after WWII, Jewish nationalists blew up buildings in Jerusalem; and so on, and
so on, and so on. Truly, there’s nothing new under the sun. Except what comes out of an explosion of love.
Cheers, Jake.
*No,
this is not an image grab from an actual suicide-bomber cam. And this is most
definitely not an image from the restaurant in Indonesia that was blown to
bits. I took the image from an online magazine and practiced my well-honed
Photoshop skills on it, so please, no letters to the editor!
UPDATE: I wrote this poem with its accompanying images a number of years ago when social media and IT were in their infancy. On March 15, 2019, in Christchurch, NZ , a white supremacist, anti-Islamist nutbar used a headcam to live-stream his butchery of some 50 people and scores wounded who where praying at their local mosques. I'm sure it's happened before this year, and will happen again that such depravity is videotaped and used to promote hatred and violence. Though I must admit that the sick bastard's use of a headcam while he walked around shooting men, women and children to death is a lot more exciting click bait and keeps viewers glued to their seats than the above bomber-cam idea of mine. Mine is a 'one-shot' deal, after all. After the bomb blast, the show is over. In Christchurch, he could keep streaming until he ran out of bullets. Media-savvy, that one!
**In the sense that what they do ‘makes sense’ in
this way: Terrorists fight in ways that we don’t fight (or at least we pretend
we don’t, or we’ve forgotten). We have our drones and missiles; they have backpack bombs and IEDs. It’s an example of asymmetric warfare, the kind we'll see more and more as the century progresses. Terrorism is non-denominational. It’s open-sourced and available to anyone with a grudge.
Weren’t the American colonists of the Eighteenth Century, fighting for their freedom considered
terrorists by their British overlords? And today? Mind you, I don’t think blowing
up schools or whacking the heads off priests is a particularly good way to gain sympathy for ‘a home of our own’, but neither is dropping bombs from 20,000
feet. War is inherently chaotic, dirty and bloody, and without some kind of
resolution, some agreement to at least reach a status quo of some sort, we’ll
spiral down and down until all sides are either exhausted and destroyed, or else we'll fall
into a heart of darkness where we end up collecting enemies’ skulls to
decorate our front lawns. (Leon Rom,
a French rubber trader and possibly the real-life ‘model’ for Joseph Conrad’s “Kurtz”
in the 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness,
and whom Conrad met on his travels in Africa, kept skulls of uppity Congolese
natives staked around his trading post during the infamous, late nineteenth century colonial rule of the
Belgian king, Leopold II.) Nice!
The Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, 2600 years ago, apparently enjoyed viewing the severed head of the Elamite king he'd recently defeated while relaxing after dinner. (It’s a little hard to see, but Ash is lying on his
recliner sipping wine, and the king's severed head is in a fir tree
towards the left of the relief.
My favourite is the relief of the impaled soldiers. They look quite decorative, don't they? Geeze! Those
Assyrians were not to be messed with! It’s a good thing we don’t do stuff like that
today.
Okay. It’s Ned Stark’s staked head from Game
of Thrones. (Damn you Joffrey!) There’s more than enough real life butchery to go around, and I figured this would be a little more palatable to readers than grizzly depictions of ISIS executions or Mexican drug gang murders. (By the way, does anyone remember Rwanda?)
