Rat Brain Scan Check Points
Henderson, Jock Jr.
POEMS: Jock Henderson, Jr. Rat Brain Scan Check Points I-I Rat brain scan check points and Check-point Charlie At the Brandenburg Gates {ire not quite the same. The barbed concrete and...
...1 August 1980:439...
...From his throat, tin soldiers strut into a Battle circus...
...Who but the unseen soldier shoots to kill...
...kapow...
...gargle) (The body breathes ragged in mortal battle) Would conclusio turn up, a corpse inferred...
...The pen continues to cross the page, A ghostly solo staged by a feathered quill, In a lonely struggle of the autonomous will...
...II: The Lament of the War Messenger Can you feel the origins of fear, the transport of feces or waves oF peristalsis Deep in your neurons, dear...
...Shot down just off the premises, .(kersplat...
...Thus proof concludes on its own, (Jock Henderson's poem "Feeling the Heat's Pyrotechnics," published in the December 21, 1979 Commonweal, received the second-place award for poetry from the Catholic Press Association...
...Grabs with killer claws for the jugular, And strangles himself to death...
...AH human brains are now rat-scanned By the invisible, uninvited presence Of the subliminal synapse patrol...
...Would my flesh turn up, proof against these words...
...On the frontiers of history, Inside the fortified silos and submarines, Professional warriors have computerized their neurons Into closed loops with doomsday weapons Double-cocked and stop-gapped beside them...
...Commonweal: 438 The Martyr and the Army The performer numbs toward the moribund...
...A PSI-war malaise of radar nightmares And vacuum locks, goes undeterred by De-classified science and technology...
...Inexorable, those laws of logic, Relentless, the drive from hand to tool, To hand and back to tool become machine: And the world will be controlled by mankind...
...0 child with no hands mutant fetus aborted wordless man untooled worldless spacewalker adrift earth umbilical severed history's dead depraved vacuumous, anonymous dooms no epitaphs, not even graves III Beside a hammer of ebony rubber, A diamond braided chisel rests in beauty Upon an ivory tombstone...
...On and on, temporal sequence flees Towards something preordained...
...See...
...my torso lands in blood) A ghost beyond the major (rattle) A flash below the minor premise...
...I loiter over the loss of choice, At the decline of judgment subjected To a plague of total control...
...Towards some eminently, impossible state...
...One by one, they go to the maniacal attack...
...I learned about the neutron bomb On your brain and the ballistic Interdiction on the path to your womb At great expense to my public reputation...
...Though the proof of the haunted tool remains A shadowy epitaph inferred out of the unknown, Yet those ghostly links animate This corpse through hardest stone...
...Oh my Los Alamos honey, my Nagasaki pussy, There are such dreary, final blackouts In this dull, foul holocaust...
...Blackened blood flushes from the cortege) An ideal machine with no audible groan...
...The Proof ol the Haunted Tool I But what if the poet is shot down in the middle of the proof...
...Each synapse cuts out its risky bit, a rat brain scan check point, Harnessed to the machines of global fate...
...Beneath the night shroud, An entire army arises from the trachea Of one, singular martyr, now divine With the figor mortis of military design...
...Tales of death, tales of torture Rise up beneath the heaven's harrow And perish, as if into bottomless labyrinths, Only to return distorted as dime-store myths: UFO's, cacedemonic crimes and perversions...
...Ill We live in formaldehyde, inside the missing jar With the obsolete, bullet-riddled brain...
...II Only logic and machine remain hand to Tooling the rule of nature by man...
...2 The war messenger's lament goes unheard...
...Pop-mod psych, and radioactive psycho-pathos Dissolve opaque violence into something broken And lame, into something less than nothing...
...Puppet wraiths rush out From the perverse gullet, of necessity, Mortal but ready to die at arms...
...The truth of classified R-and-D is missing In action astride the East-West corridor...
...The barbed concrete and grim-visaged arrogance Of the latter are visible, whereas the jammed Instruments of science in the public interest Cannot locate the microscopic beams of the former...
...No one but myself can touch them Except to cut them off at checkpoint...
...My genitals bear the stigma Of a covert surgical operation...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 14
