On Reading Paul Muldoon

This stuff is coldly
Clinical, those words
Chink together like
Little metal beads 
Fashioned out of
Spare parts, borrowed mostly
From other scrapyards,
Metallic productions of
Hollow metal words
Pumped-up with stolen people's
Heat injected with appropriate
Colours to the graft of deliberate
Mechanisms cogs and shafts
Exhale a pallid sheen, a shelled
Surface effect, steely and
Untrue.  Such borrowings still
Do not infuse the thing with
Life, a scourge lies
Beneath the skin of them 
The coldness is deliberate 
Frosted breath, only the 
Cerebral tick
Is loud and heard, the only
Heat in the room is the
Anger of the watcher radiating
The silence with red.

His a surfeit of thought
And leavings, dregs and
Outpourings 
For the heart of the thing
Is squashed, the soul has been
Stolen, the body 
Swollen with air.  This is
Man's work:  
No compassion
No sense the frame
Structure only can he classify 
Objects examine with admirable
Precision, his X-ray is
All eyed and detached vision
A computer brain the 
Envy of the man birthing 
Mere copy, knowing no
Fear joy pain real living being.
His clinical machine is 
Frightening in its unlatching
Hand from heart
And the cold result 
Is the clinking word he cannot 
Breathe life into.
His lack of appropriate data 
Makes him scour the
Eye of them, hollow the
Heart of them, he can
Wring no warmth no heat no
Feeling from a dead thing: man's
Easy objectivity is
The dispassionate experiment
Engaged in vivisection 
Of senseless meaning
Of words that mean no thing.

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