THE PLUNDERERS

Meanwhile, in the psycho-netherworld
Of scarcity thugs,
And ideals gone awry
Of butchered, dying poets,
There lives another breed
From the barrel of a gun
From a barrio-world
Of left-behinds,
Unlucky to be born
Putrid pock-marked "big suits"
Whose haircuts reek of barbers' lime
Who bully to make their bank books full
Who kill and hurt
Who hold tight
To memories and destinies
Of fear and hate
Of mongering, hungering
Bureaucracy,

They start on a slab,
A corpse slab cold
Concrete, steely and
Tiger-eyed crews
Build tower after tower,
In a bleak, bird-boned ugliness dream
And they force-feed multitudes,
Those downtrodden others,
Non-related, in their otherness
These are the fractured,
The skeletal remains of blank hearts.

Fat, overgrown vodka eyes
Loom over desks from cages,
Stalking in dossier files
With their upper edge stealth
They're there
The new power ethnic cleansers
Working, cleaning, killing,
Doing the bang
Selling mushroom cloud casements
In back-alley sprees
Or grandstand posturing
With their repressive creeds.

Having the precision of former blackboots
But in hi-tech rank and file
The sinister, vapid
Con-men come-ons
From Planet X
With their meat-packed bellies gorged
They fall, distended
From abuse and now
Abusing
Plunder us, plunder us all.


June 9, 1995/ Nonsan, Republic of Korea