Chris Chilton
Civilisation

Etymology

From the Latin oleum, which is olive,
olive of the olive branch,
gnarled and ancient trees
in gently ordered groves.
Ripples of grey soil, 
black, green and virginal
is the oil.

First Pressing

Morsels of microscopic marine growth
juiced
beneath a shifting world.
Eurasia mounting Africa -
an elephant in season -
the two backed-beast
of Iago’s prurient imagination.
He watches, the voyeur, their juices drawn down
into lakes beneath a sea of sand.

Refinement

It was an immaculate conception.
No one in those warm sub-tropical valleys
thought for a moment! And we were so pleased when you came.
A neolithic surprise, you screamed at the world,
unplanned and emboldened
by how little you knew.

But from the very beginning your modern ways
concerned us. Right from the start we knew you were
special in some way. You rattled too loudly your flints and seed,
euphrated your knowledge of grasses abroad
and watered with your science
the great alluvial plain.

And before we knew it, you’d grown dissatisfied
with crude cuneiform and had changed your voice,
soon cut a fine, ugaritic dash, and boldly announced to the world
“I know things now we didn’t know before!”
Astonished, we exchanged looks,
dismayed you’d grown so brash.

Then, oh, those terracotta statuettes
were such a shock to us. Plump ceramic women,
their elongated breasts bared to the world. Morbid obsession is the term
that springs to mind, and frankly, we’d rather not dwell upon this
particular aspect of your youth,
no doubt some quest for God, or truth.

But how clever you were to make sedentary
the beasts, and gather them all in one place. So obvious,
one wondered it hadn’t been done before. Urbanised, though not urbane,
we were so pleased, finally, to see you settle down,
on est chic, in one’s stylish ziggurat,
with family, aviary and grey, slinky cat.

Second Pressing

And the drill,
screaming drill,
bites the earth
granular earth,
enters rock
innocent rock,
bores a vent
tubular vent.

Glazed-eyed, it penetrates.

And deep within
the clenched earth,
in wrenching spasms
of clastic rock,
an upward flood
of viscous anger,
charged with deeply
cratered fury,
scalded by its
outraged flesh,
a pressured lake
of righteous passion
driven by some
inner logic,
rises through the
steel cut vent,
erupts and shrieks
its blackened anger,
spills its rage on
burning sand.

And green-eyed winds and desert storms
outblast the cries
of violated rock.
And ears made blind by crude appeals
(to civilised values, and dollar bills)
disdain the staining of the sand,
dismiss with scorn the greasy slut.

So black the wound,
So deep the cut.

Pipeline

Then GC Oil,
a crude congress of combustible matter,
turning wheels and economic architecture,
underlying desert,
underpinning policy,
underlying ocean,
(though, importantly, desert)
underpinning consciousness,
(that dark kaleidoscope,
that smeared window on the world,
that other world.
Not us.
Those.
Un-.)

Premium Grade

O people!
Our fortress in the sand!
Secured by biblical ordnance,
Sanctioned by GC Oil,
O underwrite our policy fiscal,
O stabilise our markets,
Grant us altruistic licence and
Beneath your burning sun give us
Feelgood factor 48.
Echoes of armies on the march
Blighted ghettoes, racial hygiene
Arbheit Macht Frei,
Bare and acrid butcher’s ovens,
Nightmares packed in old brown cases,
You came.
On barren hills and plains you built,
Soothed our holocaustic guilt.

Arithmetic

Lubna counts four;
the thoughtful guide,
her index finger
counts, digit by digit,
each nail a crescent moon
rising over finger tip.
On squared pages
caryatids of numbers
rise unjustified above
pedestals of equal signs,
resolving with quiet deftness
the world into certainty.

(While swivel chaired and easy,
index finger perpendicular
making L with second
cleft neatly in chin,
Frank watches.
A cold blizzard of numbers
Lockheed up 60 to $44.90
GD 107 up to $84 dead,
makes calculations,
ponders the odds.)

Who counts?
Whose counting?
Does Lubna count?

Temple

A grease nipple of aped Roman grandeur.
A crude congress of pinguid politicians,
suckling,
mouthing lubriciously their
saponaceous syntax,
spattering with viscous vocabulary
their sebaceous semantics. 
Greasing palms and oiling wheels
with pomatum pledges and slippery deals.
A rubber-gloved hand to move the pieces
on black and white squares,
(this patchwork of hues
and vibrant breath)
to squeeze the throat
of any who ask,
who counts?

Civilisation

General Dynamic up $1.07 to $84 dead.
Considers; to buy or sell, or simply hold?
Says to McIntyre:

Uncivilisation

If ever my home
the place of my birth
the roof overhead
the bricks I help lay
the walls I helped paint.

If ever the soil
that my family worked
for ten generations
invested their toil
had planted and loved.
If ever my heart,
the blood that it turns,
the vessels that carry
the air that I breathe
and the flesh it sustains.

If ever a storm
no oil would subdue,
would never abate
the turbulent swirl,
or ever be calmed.

If ever my life.              

Twisted Logic

Sure we made mistakes, it’s a big and difficult world
(Actually, not mistakes; just things that went wrong;
Accidents, not errors, if that was implied.
We meant what we did.)
In hindsight sure, the flaws are clear,
The results were wrong, but not the intent.

(No ethical misjudgement,
Just flawed application,
Pragmatic faux pas.)
As a matter of fact it’s
The natural lifespan of policy,

Unravelling’s expected,
Success gauged by gain
In the shorter term.

but look,
resolution 242,
can’t you see…

as far back as
MacMahon-Husain
and Sykes-Picot when …

not to mention Suez
in ‘56 when nothing
was gained and nothing…

and Resolution 338,
or Sabra and Chatila
when thousands…

and maybe six million
dying from sanctions
imposed on …                        

you blame sickness of mind,
a warped evil brain,
an unrequited envy …

cluster bombs,
fall alongside
weapons grade rations…

The sand is blackened,
and life is blasted,
by the twisted logic of GC Oil.

Prospecting

Under frozen wastes where reindeer graze
on perma-frosted land so beautiful
it hurts the eye to gaze
unprotected,
where Innuits live and fish and hunt for food
and have for as long as anyone up there can remember,
which is a long time in a place like that
where everything is so cold that even
memories are encased in ice for future generations
to thaw out over a fire at night and relive their
ancestors’ lives through story and myth,
and where sometimes water freezes in mid-air
and hangs in jagged cascades of pointed crystal,
and where everything that survives there
has endured long periods of adaptation
because for all its lush beauty
this is pretty inhospitable territory;
a place that city dwellers dream of going to but never do,
because it’s so far and the transport never comfortable
or even easy, and it’s so damn cold
that even thinking about it exercises your bladder,
so instead we stay in the cities and excuse ourselves
with self-deprecating remarks about dependence
on modern conveniences and being too soft and civilized,
(and who’s to argue with that?)
and stay put and admire from afar
and maybe wish some day
before it’s too late, since life isn’t a rehearsal
and we don’t come round again,
that money and time and self-will and a white ship
might take us on that long trip Northwards,
where days are long and cold
and beauty is beyond anything, except breathing,
(those wispy cones of frost at the edge of your mouth)
and sit at night with this image of frozen mountains in our heads so long
it becomes a symbol of a life we wish we had,
some noble deed we should enact,
some path we must pursue towards a life more meaningful,
a place with greater purpose,
an advance on where we’re presently mired,
in this shallow grave of consumerist crap,
this regimented quest for one-ness and self-image,
the label to die for, (so long as it’s someone else dying)
the MacCultural Revolution led by Nike’s Red Guard;
up there surely there’s something more precious,
more worthwhile, than this shabby lust for things and packaging;
up there in that white, unspoiled Eden,
beneath which, there is oil.