Hackers: Let The Music Back In

 The first part of this poem by Ben Schofield was originally published on May 21, 2012.

Let the music back in, let it be loud;

Let it dissolve the thoughts that swim unrelenting,

Thoughts of trails freshly climbed, loose soil knocked by boots of the wandering sage;

Thoughts of barren scree, bearded with ice;

Thoughts of faithless gentlemen ruined by a world of devotees, each livid, maddened by his cause, unthinking in their pursuit;

Of two fatal white holes, dotted with red, two thin fingers apart;

Of the long roaming Bodhisattvas, without titles, without exploitation, without descriptions forced upon them;

Of a silence that scratches.

Like the woollen underwear of the monks habit;

Devotion proved by suffering.

No silk graces my two sore cheeks,

But my ears shall never be empty.

II

Humanity epitomised, inspired and inactive I fall down on my knees to worship daily

No reply, the echoes are only empty, the shot cracks against the cathedral walls, the tang of  cordite drives a spike into my belief.

A hundred teenagers climb out of a hundred windows each night with backpacks full of paint, worn trousers speckled with white

Dew, not the only droplets to fall from angelic hands when the sun goes down;

Just a mark to make, the world only a canvas

Stop the machine, it’s run too long, now the damned tape’s gotten tangled

And the desert is filled with strange men driven out of cities which were too cold for them.

Across the way ascetics gaze longingly at junky veins, not knowing all, praising their emptiness,

The spanner has long since been ground to dust and the saboteur sent to the Urals

My generation, born unto the desert of plenty, our greatest fight with atavism and none of us know time because we were born too soon or too slow.

We have too much respect for our elders or as they put it, not enough;

Culture always turns to endophagy, but the poison that killed its kin, culls the fresh spawn.

Inheritance: a world putrefied by territorial pissings borrowed from us to begin with, now made 40% lesser by tax.
I was two weeks late out of the womb, outside I see why.