david mclean

Anxiety Picking Clean

tonight is anxiety picking clean
the strenuous flesh
from the abject bone
with fingers unmanned by
futility and fever.

but the brutal blood is lazy,
and will not raise its head
to salute the patient sky,
the same that waits here
forever above us, a medallion
coined by love, just money
for dust, the moon another
sullen blind slut.

for life picks its own bones clean
like a self-sufficient vulture,
refusing the proffered help
of brothers and sisters,

and erecting her own skeleton
as a church for deaf gods,
silent under patient skies
full of moons and time.

anxiety is the active fingers
that cleanse the skull;
their activity being life,
their fever time,

they are not my fingers
but their anxiety
is mine


It is Not Beating, to my Unborn Son

it is not beating, which seldom happens here
where so few are Christians in this land;
but the children are dead, and they cut death's truth
in the unremarkable living flesh, disaffected fuckers,
since their mothers, like almost all mothers, are cannibals,
bitches who imagine dropping a brat means you own it forever,
that it is your whore. so mothers write poems called
“to my unborn son” because they are stupid,
and stupidity is why people do anything, says Homer
Simpson. they assume the kid will maybe fuck love good,
because nobody else does.

and thus the children are slightly desperate, already
as two year olds. i maybe had an unborn son
recently. the poem i might have written to him
would have run “welcome to the world, son,
and to an incinerator in the gray basement
of a hospital, where they flush away shit
like you would probably have become.”
i can stand it that the children cut the flesh
happier, it means that they are still human
on some level, but when they get ecstatic
over Gestapo seagulls squawking, and are happy

for whatever, then they will be dead forever,
because death is an inexorable lover
and there is no coming back from his grasp.
then i cannot stand to see human children
become pretend-happy soldiers in convention's
crippled army. it's then that i would like to have done
the cutting in them myself, but with a razor less superficial,
one that helped them even better, prevented
their final deaths. because all my dead children
live forever, and the are jet boys really so preoccupied
they don't care about the war, not any war,

not even the war that keeps society whole and sober,
that makes mothers murderers
and children grow up whores
and soldiers


My Hands Before You

my hands before you are dead animals
that touch nothing, wry sacrifices
to night and its sacred torment;
the one that wracks memory wakeful
lest we should ever forget it,

forget that my hands were animals
i slaughtered before you once,
and burned on a timeless pyre;

smoke rising thence to high gods
dead in the empty sky,
when our memories
were young then,

we were young men,
clean and fresh as madmen,
and the moon was new