The Young Turks Dream of
Derek Jarman
The beautiful young men,
forced-laboring in Sardinia,
sweating in the steel mills,
hung, hanged by the wrists,
strung up for whipping.
Young men, naked,
sweating, greasy, hairy, filthy slaves,
tortured by the gruff Polack foreman,
the whipmaster, hanging
the handsome, bound, young men
up-side-down,
suspended stripped,
nude, naked for industrial torture.
The leather whip cuts across
young muscled back.
Somebody’s sons.
Somebody’s brothers.
One, a great beauty, a convict convicted
of crimes against nature,
suspended by his spread ankles.
Ah. The handsome moustached slave,
more perverse than the whipmaster,
grows hard,
beaten by the muscular foreman.
They know not they are watched,
from a distance, and close up,
by men who enjoy
their brutally sensuous punishment.
Young men born to suffer,
working at hard labor,
imprisoned in the Sardinian penitentiary,
serving sentences indeterminate,
pulled from chained solitary confinement
to labor by the sweat of greasy muscle.
Hard,
they are, one by one,
stretched spreadeagle,
suspended up-side-down
by their boots,
spread against steel grills,
bound, tied, forcibly whipped
in the total male sensuality
of young men serving time,
serving a cruel master,
punished,
in a dream,
in a steel dungeon.