Jack the Ripper's Star

"Every man and every woman is a star."
                                      Aleister Crowley

As the Earth's population continues to swell
Toward the tipping point of its axis,
The showers of stars spraying out like diamonds
From the fingers of creation multiply as well;
The Universe is constantly expanding.

As new suns illuminate the heavens
Old shining orbs flicker out and die,
Becoming cold desolate chunks of stone
In lifeless solar systems.

The Star of Shug, the inventive cave-dweller
Who first fashioned wheels to lighten his load
No longer gives off any radiant light.

The Star of Swack, the brave nomad
Who shaped the first spear that successfully
Pierced the hide of a wooly mammoth
Has dimmed to darkness as well,
As have myriads of generations of suns
Of those who lived and died unremembered.

Red dwarves, red giants, even supernovas
Such as the beacon of Bethlehem that led
The Magi to the manger behind the inn.
They had their moments, then expired,
Just as Jack the Ripper's star will as well.

A hate-filled unrepentant psychopath to the end,
Saucy Jack, the sex-crazed stalker, fervently hopes
That when his star finally does give out,
It explodes with a resounding  "BANG!"

He's hoping it bursts like a swollen seed pod
Hurtling forth lethal asteroids of extinction.
He envisions one cutting its way through the void
Like a finally-honed surgical knife
Until it slices into some smug little world,
Severing the carotid artery of its existence
As if it were some old whore's neck, nothing more.

Rage of Troubadors

In the days of the Lion Richard, of tournaments,
And honor, in the days of faith and innocence,
Troubadors, those minstrels with the velvet voices
Would roam through the realm cloaked in silken raiment.
In the pastoral splendor of Antiquity
They could touch the hearts of their listeners
With wands of song charged with melodious magic.
They'd weave their reveries into a tapestry
Of wonderous images and romantic rhapsody
That would leave their audiences rapt with emotion.

Chivalry and romance have hardened to asphalt and steel;
Savage, soulless structures that house their inmates
In the bleak grey harshness of urban despair.
We need Revolutionaries now, not sonnets.
We need poets who mirror the rebelliousness of our age.
They ravage their voices with shouts of angry defiance
Punctuated with chords of electric violence.
They claw at their instruments with a frenzied passion,
As though raw brutality could wrest wisdom from them
And translate it into waves of charged pandemonium.

Those screams that you hear are the rage of troubadors
Doomed to live in their grey hell of concrete and steel.