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The
Paralytic Child
After
'Paralytic child walking on all fours' 1961
-On the
day when
man he
fell back onto all fours,
and crawled,
the seed for you
was born:
two failed cells
dividing in
the
mud,
to produce what here, now,
today, we see here
before us:
the lone spent eel of
a child; without
explanation, world,
or tail...
crawling into
and out
of yourself, as
if your
creator
he had removed
it your backbone
like a pick
from between his
teeth.
For you have
been born
Of all human deaths,
even, yes,
those wormeaten
parts of you,
(still
visible) that died,
when, in you, a religion lost its faith...
-yet
half-gutted, and
partly
atrophied, it
seems
as though
you have just crawled clear of heaven?
(before God he removed it
the
face-mask of Darwin)
for
devolution has forced
you free
of the membrane of history;
-The poise and the grace and the gait
of all ancient men,
demolished
by the one
single revolution of your hip;
species after species,
by the portent
in your eye...
-So, is there perhaps some undiscovered
tribe or people,
who, in their pockets,
still guard (religiously)
a small wooden fetish
in your image?
carved perhaps in the first
few days after the passing
of sin, once,
in a church's vault, it was
discovered:
the microfilm of a gospel
too supernatural to view?
-Yet having now
already seen
the last earth-bound creature crash
into the sea,
and the eagle grow ill
with flying, and with all
of the languages of the world now
but unwanted pulp at
the back of
your throat,
towards what new destination can
you imagine
yourself now heading?
-You our planet's only
anthropological first-born!
(as, in your mind, when you move,
the unused
flesh from your limbs,
it is hurled like clumps
of wet clay
onto some celestial grid,
where, unrolled again, it is stretched
back onto fresh bone...)
-So what in Nietzsche's or plato's mind
prevents you
from ever again standing up?
Your body that forces every
extraneous muscle to twitch, day after
day, when as a child beast,
You crawl, crawl
out from the landscapes,
into the now abandoned churches,
temples of the world,
where your 'presence' it explodes like
spittle onto the icon's lips! and where
the tilt of
your head it drops all known
stares to the ground...
Until on that day
when your death
it gives birth finally to our
last
belated truth,
on some dusty and deserted road,
or high plateau,
where, in mournful rhetoric,
all past experience's of man
are resolved,
resolved,
and never to be mentioned
again.
© Paul Stubbs
2010
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