Ruminations on Picasso’s Guernica

How quick the damned

of Guernica

try to flee the asymmetry

of casualty

and the fire’s opened mouth

masticating at their jagged flesh,

how congruent the geometry

of one hundred thousand pounds of explosive ordinance

tessellating into them

like bread,

leavened with yeast and soured with corruption,

being thrown into a crowd

eighty years away:

arms outstretched, salivary glands

churning, waiting for what must enter the mouth—

how quick the mashed bread

snakes through an esophagus

into a deflated gut,

as fast as photons

travel from the floodlight

to the banner of the Ayatollah.

People look most peaceful

when they eat, shit, fuck, kill

the need to answer their alarm

clocks in the morning, flay

themselves of their suits—

the artificial hides of the bull

market—on the coat racks of meat lockers

to linger in their earth-given nudity,

and still, people look most peaceful

when they drink, piss, bleed, chew

on the food for thought that is not

offered by the pecking order, unwind

the cerebral tourniquet to let this

thought bleed freely from the mind,

and yes, people look most peaceful

when they sleep, breathe, feel, live

in the primal bliss of achieving

chimera, right before the realization

that their feet still walk this Earth.