Sodom

Sing of the angels of Moloch
     vomiting word infernal
     snake-jaws dislocated
     wrenched as backs arched in purgation
     spasms of napalm fire-hose
     hurled forth to incinerate fair citizens of my
Sodom the abomination in steel eyes
     of a clockwork Tetragrammaton
     gazing down from hypoxian Himalayan perch
     in onyx vaulted heaven a-spatter
     with starlight of seraphim
     hung on meathooks
Sodom the stain of blood clay brownstone
     city subway ploughed by firstborn fratricide
     outcast in cornfield dreams
     stumbling scarred as I
     from the car accident death of pride
     stumbling scarecrow with a sickle
Sodom the throne of Og archaic Titan
     miscegenation of cherub jism and ape cunt
     keelhauled under the ark
     half-drowned helplessly witnessing
     drunken incest from afar
     under a new aeon's rainbow
Sodom the crystal skulled nous implicate
     in grains of a skyscraper sandcastle
     kicked to four winds in Babel
     echoing inside with every
     forked tongue lie to be silkspun
     from now to the end of human resources
Sodom the abomination the abomination
     of desolation
     in the valley of saline flats
     fixed in vision so frostbitten and surgical
     even Abraham meek to slit his firstborn's throat
     haggled mercy at dawn
Sodom the murderous inhospitable kirk
     where I was fourteen
     in my royal blue Hitlerjugend uniform
     of a Boys' Brigade Lance Corporal
     as the mob battered Sunday School doors
     to rape exquisite strangers
Sodom the market of muscle
     spurning virgin daughters pimped
     and so piety lashed with tabloid tongue
     the wrath of hysteria
     HIV the MAD of a cold war on fuckery
     and nuclear winter everafter
Sodom the San Fran Seventies
     Golden Gate vaporised in neolithic Nagasaki
     saunas all swallowed into dead sea
     boiling tears to coke-rock white
     cracked down to crumble
     cut with stain-scouring detergent
Sodom the city we fled
     as teenage slaves of Lot
     her holy whores and eunuchs of the heart
     sworn to Astarte and Baal
     all tomorrow's beloveds deserted
     to a hospice holocaust of salt and sarcoma
Sodom the home I was led from
     bound in blindfold law
     gavelled in witch's parliament
     to save my arse from phantoms of pillared perversion
     forever and ever amen to Section 28
     amen to the TV tombstone
Sodom the home I was whipped from
     iron gag clamping tongue
     not to question the scourging
     of schoolbooks and sanctuary
     not to debate with teachers in the temple
     afraid of guillotine sacking
Sodom the devastated!
     Sodom the destitute!
     Sodom the handful household
     of errand boys clutching harps
     as the 80s dragged us onward into exile
     speechless at the melted plastic blitzkrieg of identity
Sodom the beautiful!
     Sodom the glorious!
     Sodom the sacred!
     Sodom the city of breath in flesh socketed in flesh!
     Sodom the idyll I lament laid waste before
     my broken voice could join its beaded choir!
Sodom the cursed the reviled fornicating
     faghag diva of scarlet and purple bosom
     who cradled cocksucker lambs
     in black sheepskin afghans
     who loved scapegoats
     in kidskin leather jeans
Sodom my Sodom
     where now shall your kindred shelter?
     Where shall we little big spoons
     awake canoodling lips to neckfuzz
     now Mother Sodom is gone?
          Where?
               Where?
          Into oblivion!
               Sodom is gone!
Sodom my Sodom
     where now shall we be native sons?
     What tents and suburbs of marching tribes
     will not disown feral archers of desire
     to the housing schemes of
     Irvine Paisley Wishaw and Canaan?
Sodom my Sodom
     where now will spectacled runts in peacock motley
     freewheel Raleigh Choppers downhill
     hurtling crash into puberty and
     thrown ragged to the pit of fear
     be tended by brothers?
Weep for our Sodom
     you cuckoo queer hatchlings
     fostered in bowers of Egyptian reed
     fledglings ever aflurry from fire or Pharoah
     forty years migrating
     and with no milk and honey homeland promised
Weep for our Sodom
     my nameless nation of slaves to slaves
     who slipped Akhenaton's thrall
     to call our city into iniquity
     rank us with mildew rot and insect shellfish
     monstrosity! unclean! unclean!
Weep for our Sodom
     you deviant diaspora to be born
     blank of heritage erased in assimilation
     to be rebirthed each generation
     in the furious keen brows of a prepubescent
     shepherd winding slingshot truth
Weep for our Sodom
     and strum her psalms to every Saul
     anointed king or agent of Empire
     hurling javelins or epistles
     while his son breathes deep
     the scent of your t-shirt and semen on his skin
Sing how there could be no Salem before Sodom
     no assalaamu alaikumu
     until a multitude of horny youths
     ululated gifts of profanity
     strange peaches for guests to unwrap
     from palm frond hallelujahs
How the gang-rape mob was an orgiastic dance
     for soldiers for glories of stallion sweat
     we yearned to yearn to crave
     peeling helm and armour
     down to socks and jocks
     their cocks to be anointed with spit
How we only pounded the doors of a schoolyard gatehouse
     suddenly airtight in agitprop
     a Moebius wall of labyrinth State
     where bull-headed beauties
     of athletic grace
     tried us with certainty of scorn
How we only stole a glance not even a kiss
     in changing rooms of furtive erections
     torments of showering myrmidons
     we prayed oblivious outside
     our Sodom of reveries
     where ephebes rutted indiscriminate
How we only grabbed a chance
     from angels cruising our park but
     were led to bleak October to
     pistol-whipping hilltop murder
     echoing excuses of panic in defence
     of crucifixion and cigarette burns
How we demanded nothing
     but offered everything in silent Mass
     fallen breathless from summer to our knees
     before buff idols with dirty Adidas boots
     ready to share our bread bed body bliss
     and destination
How we tore up crumpled and tossed our child selves
     into furnaces crying
     Moloch! Melech!
          King of the gods!
          God of the kings!
     a soul tax exacted for seed swallowed in passion
     but all of us was never enough
How we were cursed to history
     speared on standards
          burnt at the games
     lynched from the rafters
          shot in the parks
     gassed in the bathhouses until
     broken to see the stones stakes pyres gallows woods and
How the concentration camp was
     constructed cold in every swimming pool shower
     we bit into apples crunching
     juice almond-flavoured with cyanide
     and died and rotted a year
     and wholly howled howled
How wholly fucked we were
     how fucked the fuckless and feckless brethren
     scattered to the corners
     of our blank-walled bedrooms
     with no secret language of handkerchiefs
     for the orphans of nowhere
How we had only guttural native tongues
     of a new town housing scheme
          foreign as our families
          thick and dry as
     talking adolescent lusts
     we swallowed he and him
     in a pronoun game no homo ever won
How we lived each tick-tock of almost confession
     a thousand repeats
     a thousand futures crushed in a trial's heartbeat
     and every outcome a murder
     of the schoolboy mirrored
     in the gaze of friends
How we lied to live in death
     not to smash a painted ceramic citizen
     of Ayrshire or Arizona
     not to sledgehammer idol innocence
     and rise from eggshell ruin
          afire as phoenix
          where ego was
               now id
How I never ached for your shrug
     never cursed off armour and wrestled
     monstrous idiocy to my own naked defeat
     never bit my lips to blurt revelation
     not to a sun god leonine and alien
     hunting beyond
How eight million minutes were a blink
     just a razor edge of months
          slicing passions open
     sibling war still undissolved
     so I never turned my head to alliance
          never dared it
     so you died to a stranger
How a score of summers--more--have burned away
     but still verse will not loose me
     to name your shadow
     not to mewl at light's cheap echo
     mocked in photograph's painting
     imaged in dreams unremembered
How I cannot sully your name in this song of Sodom and self
     but flail my brother
          my brother
          and you and I
     in vain a failure of words to thresh words
     to undo the thwart of lie I lived
     till your hospital end
How I thrash in a straitjacket soul
     that I never strode my ceremony of assumption
     wearing feathers of your puzzled smile
     a prodigal released from choir of kin
     to explore alterity
     and never can but must
How I have to come out to you my brother
     proclaim in shreds
     that I have fucked and been fucked
     in the Sodom of angels
     in a footballer's Hilton room
     or the bed of a bone doctor with a cock curved outward
How I have to be known to you my brother
     conjure a gulf of nightly decades
     in this rite of song
     echoing down deep to your silhouette
     the truth untold in sham of a mitzvah
     one quarter century overdue
How I have to be known to you my brother
     without a grave to kneel at
     or a ghost to listen
     or gates out of senility to an orchard
     mirage of trees we climbed apart
     in some wide snapshot of infant holiday
How I have to be known to you my brother
     without the unicorns and apples
     pretence of eternal Heaven
     or elsewise June
               in 1988
               in Kilwinning
     in the Zion daze of dog days
     before the knock on the door
How I have to be known to you my brother
     and cannot
               not now
               not ever
     cannot ever be known
     by the zeroed pin prick outline erased
     the never was
               nor is
               nor will be
     no way and no how
How? how my brother
     how can I conjure Sodom's boom from dust
     without the blank slate clean page fresh loam
     story's end rolling away forever
     coffined with your corpse
     into the crematorium's gullet?
How?
     how?
     answer me
     how?
     how?
     reveal it
Sing to me nothing
     hollowed singularity of timeless death
     without a moted eye or bloated tongue
     in silent answer to all pleas
     mute oracle of absurd inspiring
     trumpet nothing through me as a horn
Sing to and through me nothing
     to salve with nothing's scentless liniment
     dissolved always already in absentia
     you uninstanced speck of slaughter's void
     to seed in the nullity of past
     the potency of future
Sing for my brother nothing
     as you crooned to his dead brain
     engulfing every chant and cheer
     consuming memory to a dot clicked off
     and I will echo your whitespace
     of a beat skipped forever
Sing!

And for you my brother who is nothing I will sing
     And for all
          who are nothing
          I will sing
     And for all Sodom
          every Sodom every son and brother
     every daughter every father every mother
          I will sing
And I will roar the city from a grain of salt
     in every village of the Empire
     flying flags of rainbows or Olympic rings
     for queers in Russia
     stripped and lipsticked
     drinking Facebook shame of fascist piss
And I will rest my head as faggot Judas on your breast
     beloved nothing
               abolitionist of sacrifice
     alone of all the painted gods
     embracing nothing as a gift
     and gifting nothing in response
     who seals existence in a kiss
And I will carry quietude in every breath
     to frame a word a phrase a song a life
     to speak of the hollows where we built a den
     one strutting cockerel of Arcadia
     one cuckoo out of Sodom
     straight and queer
And I will go with the seed of silence as a stone
     to lay upon a monument unbuilt
     and build memorium upon the rock
     and under it you will be there
     as nothing
     foundation of a Sodom for us all
And I will go wild from our home
     as we have ever flown we sons of Sodom
     ever estranged as pilgrim libertines
     treked to salt shores of the dead
     gazing past baptisms
     the memory of nothing at our backs
And I will go before you into Galilee
I will go before you out of Ethiopia's ark
     into the crescent and the caverns
I will go before you out of Ur of the Chaldees into Canaan
     out of Canaan into the world
I will go before you into Glasgow and London
     Paris, Berlin and Helsinki
     and New York New York
     carving eternal wake I swear
I will go before you into my twenties
     and thirties
     and forties
     ever glancing back
          at where you stand
I will go before you into grief's abyss
     the raw murder of aeons
     falling fire bright in a city of endless angst
     crying for a dead faggot's dead madhouse muse
     made of words words words
          hell made of nothing
          and so dissolving
I will live ever leaving and returning
     ripping time to the thirteenth day
          to summer sun and the car
               the curb
I will enshrine in you all who've gone before
     and all now who are nothing yet
     the unsparked multitudes of butterflies
I will envision all mobs of you and I to come
     and call them you
     call to them you
          and drum
And I will go before you into Sodom.