Good and evil get beyond themselves,
the stone cold do the liberating.
At Szoborpark there are tiny tins
for the tourists with fake Russian labels
that say the last breath of communism.

It's all orderly wreckage here
in the graveyard of the undead:
arms thrown up or back, launching the body,
the doves still only just taken off, flag aloft
and the star of unmeaning, which none worship,
paling over the unconvinced, settled into the smog of glory.

There's the handshake: the stocky Hungarian—little fellah
resolved at last to take in both his hands a hard climate
—the big bear all paw who receives and delivers the truth
in equal measures, doomed, as if love of humanity
had to shame life away.

This is the art of wounds, man made featureless, dark
with purpose; man rusting, hammered back to shape,
collected in one image framed by woman: the feather bearer
—contributing, but uselessly. This is where history comes
to learn of us—experimental man, all muscle.

Here we learn it's war which makes life monumental,
war's the money spinner, soaks us for a future, war the ploughshares
reminisce. Peace is too heavy to get off the gound.
And after the terrors of every colour at the end of our
puny century of deciding, you too could be the unknown
patriot praying to be relieved of hope once and for all.

Now the queues are forming, the rich and the poor
—everyone's joining. Who can afford
the tin full of air which is only a gesture?

The dead were always under this future.
Where should we find them now?

In a park full of sledgehammers we're all of us tourists
I'm imagining another museum already for the next time
after capitalism: full of those subtle monuments freed of ideology,
freed of all styles of consciousness. You know—the flashing,
the lights, the fifty storey minimal statements, hymns to debt.

I'm waiting for a bus here still in the old smog at the edge
of old abandoned tomorrow. Something frail in tin spins over
this starless sky of cloud: new money risking all for joy,
for a string of showy moments, which let us all know that
it's not enough to be among those whom forever is wronging.
Making the world out of wounds is never enough.