
Dirge of the Brickmen, Oil on Canvas by Colin Hambrook.
Painting by Colin Hambrook of a series of bald-headed figures in red suits assaulting blue figures with large syringes. Painted into the canvas is the following poem:
**The Dirge of the Brickmen**
This is the dirge of the brickmen, stiffmen;
power-rule foolers, cooltide nailers,
sickdream schemers, crap-pile fighters.
Theirs is the earth, solid as matter,
sacred as a piece of shit. The brickmen kill,
but do not care, or do not know;
puffing themselves up on words like civilisation,
wanking on words like culture.
The brickmen torture, but
they say,
you have to be cruel to be kind
,
building temples in their image from
the sufferings of others. Within history
there has been no progress. And the human spirit
remains more impoverished than ever.
And the silence of the brickmen goes jabba, jabba, jabba
lest they hear the unconscious tell them
their happiness is at best an illusion
and their control a self-deception.
For stopping the world, even gravity
can become a meaningless concept.
But this is the dance of the brickmen, slickmen,
worshipping their god, Science, even as it dissolves
on the quantum field where the Machine
cannot be separated from the dream;
where the politics of survival cannot be felt
without knowing its shadow, the politics of eternity.
Colin Hambrook