Aftermath of a Long-Legged Dawn

Years of falsity

Stabs and thunderbolts

from places you never thought of

People drowning

People crowning themselves

As kings and queens of their self declared empires

Heretics of life looming large

Like black clouds from heaven,

Like demonic statues

booming their judgments

on our aching bones.

Punches in guts,

Shot off balls, shot off visions

Hounded by ghosts

And hounding for the other ghosts

And now it’s dark enough to

clutch at random miracles

instead of

damnation, carnage,

death, decimation and indifference

that kick open the doors and pull

the teeth out of the skulls

My damnation, not yours

Lunatics bursting their

siren-shots up to their lord

Their lord, not yours

It’s the hour to cry, tweedledum

It’s the hour to cry tweedledee

Cry for the mountains

Cry for the monsters

Cry for the goldfish

Cry for the butterfly

Cry for the waves

Cry for the noose

Cry for the nylon stockings

Cry for the bitter clowns

Cry for the moths and for the whores

Cry for frightful forgiveness

Cry for this sinister harmony

Cry for these words

Dear Silver,

your words were true

You had no time for our time

I was no hero to the million assless everymen

And I was no hero to you,

A cold idea, and just that,

And nothing more.

Ants crawl out from the center of earth

Pools fill up with rotting dead fish

Fireflies come and go, thinking of things maybe

But never of Michelangelo

I think of mammoths and I think of the satyrs

I think of old ladies with flatulence and dogs

I think of Baudelaire –

that old fucker with scars everywhere

who got tired of phantoms and laudanum jumping

inside his brain like some crazy hooker’s epiphany.

We all get it someday

And we all get tired of smokerings and serpents

working at us. They get us too.

It’s all an abysmal account

of thoughtless penetration

of liturgies, turnips and progenies in mud

Our mud, not theirs.

Our pain, not theirs.

And today,

From inside this damp cave

I speak.

My candles have refused to burn

They lie like sad relics

condemned to eternal stillness

of flesh, like icy victims and martyrs

of war and tragedy.

I turn to them

And to their silence

And now I know that

Everything’s a rabbit-hunt

Everything’s a lie.

And yet I speak calmly

of victory.