Angels In Shit

Dungheaps concrete. Behind a bronze glass veneer clank
hearts empty as money. Peril in panorama. One soul is barely a smudge of grease on a panting mania.
Impersonal as the gleam from a patrolman's sunglasses. The noise of snarling dogs is charming
by comparison. Man is surely a pliable creature to have worked
his way into this shell. Ants of steel jitterbug to a diesel
hiss; a vague sax baritone fumes.
Rumors hint that there was Justice once. Beauty too, existed.
It still may somewhere. I was commissioned to
understand all of
this, but I was too foolish to demand my toll in advance, so I plod
from week to week like any other sucker on the company clock.
I puzzle at the cruelty and the
ill-hidden
smirks on the faces of the privileged, especially when their duty
calls for them to brutalize. This countenance is true
pornography.
But then, I am not left to define the obscene, merely to observe
it. There are examples wherever I look. It is tempting to think
that my outlook is itself perverted. Only angels in shit spare
me this conclusion. They are also everywhere,
like
pristine maggots
with pure wings.
Pale butterfly spirits drubbing against a sinister
dropcloth. Yes, they are my paycheck, these bright drips on the
hood of darkness, valiant and doomed.

Everywhere I look I see angels at work doing their best.
They're each in the small business of making order in a world of
chaos. Their little areas are like peaceful islands in a sea of
violence and turmoil. Like wide-eyed simpletons shooting for
Yale on a forty I.Q. or one-legged hurdlers going for the gold
they are but whispers in a hurricane.