Healer's Lament - Mats Gustafsson, Andreas Werliin, Hans Joachim Irmler

Lament for the poet

Swallowed by the cracks in the streets

Flowers for the dead musician

Strangled by a bill collector

In a bank parking lot

Prayers for the painter

Drowned in white acrylic

No words we have for the dancer

Split apart by indecision

Sacred clap

Holy feel alight

Martyrs, healers

Why does beauty wave from dung

Calloused and unnoticed

Wise sweat of the heart invisible

Why must love ache

And peel in loneliness

Like orphans in the trash bins of the world

Dog shit

On the juggler vein

The masterpiece submerged in the abyss of blood

A painting hung

On the wall backwards

Lost to the eyes of babies

Why will sons die before their fathers?

Why do daughters give birth to children

With faces that add up to zero?

As we sit in constant halls

With chastity belts and earmuffs

Promoters, robotic music

Cancerous and vile

Mouth stuffed with tombstones

Mutilators of dreams

Battered rams spitting graffiti on uterus walls

Watermelon seeds swelling in asphalt

Traffic jams and drive-by shootings and pistol-whipped lovers

Paintings in the shadows, dancing in the spotlights of helicopters

Woe to the lost fruit and all of its nectar

Woe to the suspended soul suspended in an unformed universe

Crumb snatched

Slipped into a world of ice

Wrapped in a nightmare of AIDS tattoos and crack smoke sunglasses

No eye smooth, no navel smooth, no mouth smooth

Only nostrils plugged with the funk of dreamless men

Scripted over the length of their lives

Scripted with a pitchfork

At the edge of flame

The place where they came together

Is the place where they fell apart

They look at each other to avoid the cracked eggs

Chanting the Pledge of Allegiance

To a pitbull with a billy club

In an ocean of cracked viles and Uzi shells

Planned parenthood discussed in a think tank

Hitler became an American citizen

And hope floats in empty path of

Sailing down a gutter river

And five million forty ounce bottles of liquor

Filtered through the bladder of a ghost

That’s about to lose his pants

Holiness uttered from the bastard lips

Suck fire from ocean to stars in a drop of blood to have been to the place of

torment

And return with a badge of scars

And praise on the lips

And the silence you will understand

The ears turn inward

The work sits on the desk of the heart

Under the light of mind

The soul sweats

Extract wisdom from the tear

When the horse of desires obtained

Read into a new horizon

Then you will move through the body of God as a healing agent

Instead of a disease