The Man Who Bought My Skin

Zdzislaw Beksinski (1972)

Watching from the room behind your eyes
Yellow teeth flash in a friendly face
Wishing you didn’t have to over-analyse
Wishing you could join the human race

With blissful ignorance of all action taken
Blind faith in gods created from cut-out
Anaesthetised dealing in hearts bruised and shaken
Surgeon’s cold hand in cavities of doubt

Lost in the halls of organised culture
Where pictures hang high over upturned faces
in the pit of his gut breeds a Darwinian ulcer
Born in the nefarious conflict of races

Continents in blood bathed children cry
Bullets and bombs and empire’s advance
Lumber forward to the lip of blue sky
Occluded by clouds of profiteering vengeance

Onward to Mars in the plunderer’s delusion
The language of hope for the body’s demise
Nobody sees us, it’s all an illusion
Reaping rewards while the temperatures rise

Trees made of glue and plastic and oil
Heads full of murder and hands full of blood
run for the edge where the seas swirl and boil
or wait at the levee for the next killer flood

the sun bursts through the cold cloud at his shoulder
his glass eye gleams with a deep buried humour
You smile in return a thousand years older
dead to the world, just another consumer.