Mad Mar Walker


Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel): poet, painter, performer, singer-songwriter, founded and edited the lit e-zine Bent Pin Quarterly. She has two chapbooks: Inverse Origami the art of unfolding, (1998), and Tabernacle of Bees (2011), and an digital album of songs - These Broken Years. She was a competitor in the 2011 National Poetry Slam in Cambridge, MA on the White Plains, NY team.

Her poems have been published in ta variety of venues online and in print. She served seven years in local print journalism, and is a graduate of Charter Oak State College. See her blog at mistryels.blogspot.com  

    Blood Brothers

Hemoglobin shovels O2
into the furnace of this flesh,
Mt. St. Helena hot in the veins,
the blinding burn of 'mortalness':

Volcanic Serb and Croat erupting
Christian, Muslim, Jew, Tutsi
Hutu spew fire and ash, Skinhead
Treader of the Shinning Path, smoke
and vent like Irish Catholic and Protestant
pro-life bombers, policemen with plungers
unemployed militiamen with
fertilizer and fuel oil

We all wear the white hat and
god is always on our side as
hungry and hissing we blister
to flame ---- and blood flows always
just as red as the time before.

Whatever cause we cite, there is another
and we avert our eyes --- In each generation
the ancient animal wakes anew, the sleeping
mountain rumbles, metaphysicians mumble
incantations, the people bring their offerings
to the craters rim:

learning and law
compassion and tolerance
forbearance and forgiveness.

These spread their opium salve and the
Blood-beast dozes a while
under a gilding of grace.

Pick the scab of blessedness
and blood roils forth once more.
Some new PompeiiĆ¢€™s burned or buried
smothered in sulfur, an ocean boils
but the mountain does not care

for blood has no age of consent
no theology nor dogma
blood holds no point of view
no nationality, no vote
no academic certification
no credit rating, no latex condom.

And the blood dries to a crust,
ugly smudges down the pages
of every sacred text.
Cain and Abel were brothers
blood-brothers.
O blood without end --                           
Ah men.   

------- hopefully in the veins of the living!!!!----- 

*The poem Blood Brothers was included in Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding (1998 from Puzzled Dragon Press) and also in "We Shijin Book I" (2004 from Hanover Press)


            

    Back to the shijin page