i ACCUSE

by Séamas Carraher

i accuse the dead
for living rent free
in the rooms of my bones
for longer than i can remember.
i accuse the walls and the furniture,
sister and brother to my thingness,
for being the ground of silence
from which i have detached
and fled
like a bird of prey
picking at its own corpse.
i accuse these lawyers and doctors and gravediggers
for their surgical incisions
which conceal my wounds and our wounds
and this wound called life!
We have all come at daybreak to the impossibility of light.
i have come, my bones unfurled like a graveyard
over this house of the dead,
this house called life!
From here i accuse all these eyes for
looking inwards,
abstracted, for their solidity
in paper and concept, their
confusion in food and profit, their pleading
with the mouth to unstitch its nerves
one more time: “not so!  not so!”.
This endless lament without body or grief.
i accuse the mouth for its slyness,
its cunning saliva, its grinning with the skull.
It is all emptiness and we are standing here
like a bird poised for flight.
i accuse the skull for its talking,
all this ruthless talking within which
i cannot hear myself.
And History, the loudmouth, its arrogance
in facts that are full of ghosts,
its removal of the flesh from the skin,
the skin from the bones,
and now look how it flees
down the long corridor of these empty mansions
crying: "not now! Not here! Not me!"
i accuse the shoe for pretending
it is the foot
the mask, the face.
Finally, i accuse you
from the skeleton of this small being i was
on that road from Hanoi or Phnom Penh,
i accuse your eyes
and your sweating hands
and the light you allowed go out
your belt whistling through the air,
O my secret fascist!
How our skin drops
like naphalm
from
the
trees.