The minute details of the moment emblazon on his skin
As even the supple touch of a hand can leave one stranded
To fend for one’s self, a plant derived lipstick kiss
From a Greek or Persian muse landed squarely on his neck
Causing him to falter under his own lack of strength
Bending him quite in half, the top of him tipped directly forward
Into the yellow light of morning as his legs stand back
Into murderous night where small knives can puncture his skin,
Taking him in a localized fierceness that opens his lipstick laced neck
Into the dirty air of a skinny ghetto alleyway leading only to decrepitude and rot,
Causing even the lightness of life to grab the short knife in its own defense,
Seeking the victory that could very well be some other man’s,
Not his at all, and in this muse laced moment, the minute details of his life
Flung out on the butcher block before him leaves him excited
Gasping for the dirty bombed out decrepit ghetto air in a solemn and isolated climax.
Soon the air will bind him, stand him tall and walk him into the arms of Death
As men before him have also called on the distrusted virtues of deceitful stench
Dragging them like this man into oblivion before they could even race against it
Devastated like the bombed out subway tunnels of a world war era land
Where families sought protection from the air raids and missile sights,
Bombed out like so many lives stacked one atop another in piles
Of famished death. In his vision, he entrusts all future to the memory
Of all things past, his entire family shot before him in the streets of an Eastern Bloc
In front of the bombed out cold war architect’s visions of the perfect utilitarian,
Utopian city once scrambling for identity in a modern world where forty years on
The West would dictate to tear down the walls so the destitute could see its wonders
So that twenty years later than that declaration, women could be sold like livestock
For the benefit of a twisted sense of capitalism where even the drugged,
Enslaved, cash crop of a nation could be whisked halfway around the world
To become any man’s dirty little whore as even these men hear no voices from their muse,
Indeed they had killed their muses at the first note of song
Carrying the bodies into the slums of small knife fugitives,
With the sex trade laborer shot full of a hundredth hit of junk.
Walking these streets in the full light of day, in fashionable suits,
Are the same men who by night visit the curtained drug hazed rooms
With the gunman standing in the hall observing any muse-less man
Seeking a senseless, baseless orgasm of power, greed, and frenzy
By making what no one could call love to the doped up woman
Who is half in and out of her underwear and consciousness.
Like his muse, the woman could very well be dead without his knowing,
He could very well be fondling a corpse of plain anonymity
As even when the call of love had come, he could only think of his murdered family
And then his dead bride and son, thinking now that his life, the whole of it,
Is literally this hopeless, that humanity and any regard therein,
Does not in fact exist as all of his pleasures now come from pain,
As all wars want desperately to enlist the masochists in the survivors
Causing two souls a thousand miles away
To become as close to obliteration as they can come,
This man living with the eminent hope that he will never be as weak
As the faceless woman he is tonight ravaging
Far from the dirty industrial and spent bomb air of his murdered homeland
Where women too were raped, children killed or enlisted by more powerful men,
Many dying before turning eighteen years of age
Until an entire country is soon bred on Death’s depravity.
With little hope for the freedom called out by the West but by cash to the crooked
Many now involved in international trade with pimps who coerce and sell
The remains of any feminine life or living from the streets of the Eastern Bloc
Kidnapped, brought to perform in an eviscerated sexual paradise
Of a dim lit flat or windowless storefront where flesh becomes a commodity
as dark as will be allowed.
Even the woman’s kid brother, who is dying of cancer, will live to see another day
As this is the family’s only way to pay his bills.
Yet, he will die anyway, with his oldest sister far from home,
Drugged up and losing her soul beneath so many men,
Forced to give it to them for mere pocket change
Until there is little left but the man who has ravaged her.
He is confident in his path as soon he too, will die,
And not even history will pay him any mind
As he had cut and carved his muse with his small knife those many years ago,
After his entire family had died its murderous death with the same regard for humanity
He now has emblazoned on his neck in the form of a Death Wish Kiss.
-Rob Borges, 2010
