Jake Chapman
Ode to the Industrial Revolution
Beneath Satan’s iron-clad cranium…
Cyclops casts a doe-eye o’er
his immortal thousands,
who strive…
with dreadful hearts pumping,
and lungful furnaces,
hissing flames
in subterraneous arteries
and subcutaneous caverns…
snouts sap like drowning moles,
to satiate the infernal furnace with ancient coals;
doomed in airless gloom—let them delve!
Saved—nay hidden—from frightful sight,
whilst on the surface of their toil
in joyful Bacchanals our woes we do drown,
(like) the litter of cats and dogs,
plunged into bags,
in river met…
misery flows away,
on current
raisin
fruit
and nut
—an iron bar—
clunk…!
grim ambassador of Death!
And seized within,
a damaged landscape’s ample bound
the wheels of the bus go ‘round and ‘round,
matter, first found, then wrought, wrenched asunder—
there!—manufacture is found—what wonder!
Rudely unfolding Satan’s latent wealth
and Nature’s stolen worth,
diffuse manner torn from the Earth!
Hidden beneath rocks,
in dormant slumber, in clay, and shallow lodging,
sleeps crude iron,
filthy interstellar nucleosynthesis,
here lies the death-bed of infinite time—
Rust In Pieces.
Here too blackest bitumen retires,
in beady eyes—
or polished ball-bearing,
future flames flicker,
roaring volcanoes deafen the hard of hearing!
Superheated gases,
owing nothing
to the temperature of the sun,
belch from the bilious aperture of industry’s bum,
with black-ash plus pumice
mixed with the bright efflorescence of sulphur.
Turbulent clouds coil,
the cumulative insistence of a morbid nightmare—
curling plus entwining,
puffs of mephitic vapour
wink indolently…
From the earth’s gigantic blowhole,
Poison to choke the air,
chemicals riot,
black soot plus incinerated basaltic rock,
gushing into white-hot magma-chamber—
the lurid furnace
—of obese paroxysm.
Heat ripples purple sea,
the sum fury
of every lightening strike,
ever to have hailed from-sky-to-earth,
now polarity reversed,
a million years of accumulated wrath—
tectonic holocaust rages from earth’s
monstrous bowels.
The corpse-grinder takes revenge,
thrust upwards,
into a mortally wounded heaven.
Subductive power,
sent into the sky,
absorbs the onslaught,
water draws back,
as though aghast,
peeling from the obscene protuberance,
to reveal, by chance,
in the vacated abyss,
many legions of sea creatures
stuck fast in slime,
vast metal mountains,
stainless steel valleys,
hidden in unplumbed depths…
So the sea rises
in its turn,
dashes mightily against land,
overwhelms shoreline,
and levels church,
engorging the populations
of animals plus man in sickening affray.
Soon the sun is dimmed,
a dark mass now so dense,
the cloud to collapse under its weight,
a black avalanche,
rains from ruined sky…
The terrible form,
sprouts,
filaments,
twist plus turn,
twisting inside,
and out,
of single,
and three phase
convection currents,
twisting and turning,
now,
a swarm moving en masse, cognisant,
with nucleated aim…
The air thickens,
Nuts, bolts, washers, screws, tooth and nail
drop from cloud
one-by-one-by-one,
a living, breeding,
carpet on the ground,
plus
swathing earth—
the noise of industrious insect jaws—
gluttonous iron locusts
vomit scalding lava,
streams and steam,
and every particle of substance,
prone to relentless mandible gnaw.
Before our very eyes,
matter now tortured and transformed,
matter traded—‘kind for unkind’,
until the excrement of toil and rack,
tints the blue sea dark brown
plus green land black…