A trickle of dust spreads

like a feather.

Earth is never silent

but my departed friend

is quiet now.

The roads his feet walked

will not be the same.

The gang is gone.

I see receding into space

a room of empty chairs.

I see them painted on a cliff,

the ones I've loved.  I fell away.

They hovered full of blood

while I dried out.  I left

without a reason to be found.

They are diving off the map

in many directions.  I can't

keep track from this wolf's hill

or that deer's bed

the river's shade digested

one balding eclipse

green path between

the living and the dead.

She's a pantheress

guarding the theater

she wears the necklace

of her heavy metal heroes

and many witchy bracelets

in her dreams she wields

a fiber optic brush

massive screens and thudding speakers

run their reels around her strange devotion

her sharp dark eyes and swift uncanny hands

Skulls of the stripped future

staring through a glass society

glowering between glazed leaves

spirit growing in a map of guts

lined eyes of a grindcore girl

leading me to the top of the wall

to watch the fertilizing water

the wheel grip of a bubble car

the scythe of an advertising laser

hands drinking from the glue pot's

catch of thought

cranks hatching in the vortex

threads of flesh that will forget

the pit of light's renewal

BUTLERIAN JIHAD

Cut out the tongues

of the machine worshippers.

Bury them in salt.

Remind them with the strength

of physical fire

what man is made of.

Reach into the heart

of blackest metal.

Take back the relationship

of leaf to sun.

Let lava run over the factories.

Drape alleyways in silk

make the meat of consciousness

rage sweetly in their half lit sway.

Clear the tables

and their currency away.

Sit down with the ancients

by the flower of the new.

Build some disconnected temples

on the planes of melted sand.

Join cut wires to these raw

configurations.  These instructions

never need become commands.

Let the silence stand.

They are amused by the antics

of their new master.

The arrival of sure death

leaves them unchanged.

They want to be loved

by the sucking void.

Relieved of flesh

and consciousness at once.

Glad to have no target

and no end in sight.

Floating in the vast

disfigured brain.

Freed from love and pain

possessed by purest math.

The condom holding seeds

of some god's wrath

suspended overhead.

Pragmatic congregation of the dead.

Tall rows of plastic pines

sealed up in time

the technics in the slime.

Metallic babies.  Religious robots.

The votes of empty eggs

collected in the bin of sacred waste.

Description of an unremembered taste

deployed by lipless lips

the shape of boneless hips

assimilating rivers of decay

resigned to the collapse of night and day

subsuming all.

Archives of afterthought

pulses denied

machinery for an idle paintbrush,

fresh cancer of the genitals

gorgeously on display

in feathered fractures

spirals of semi sentient rain

enfolded in a tortured realm of bodies

waves of dancing hordes

on a shrinking wire.

No formula for bright return

in the wings that churn.

Now I'm the gargoyle

adorning the temple door

grinning above the proud parishioners

waiting for bigger game.

Stormed by lice

and licking my granite chops

with a gasoline tongue.

Letting the pointed archway

play my ribs

like a felt xylophone hammer

watching a beauty clad in cheesecloth

flee into the forest

where I am preparing to go.

Prowling in Medusa helmet and drag

I will inhabit each tree

and watch her from

the silent storm within the wood.

Torment of fools in cages

drinking mugs of rancid petroleum

a bad joke in God's image

counting pebbles beneath a bridge

to calibrate the destiny of fleas

the roles of dancing chairs

a velvet noose above the roaring flame

a butchered name.

Bones reaching through rings of vapor

fresh horizons of captivity

disguised as fate.

The realms of seed gathering plastic

have opened up.  The heart finally

buried in granite has

closed its magic eyelid

on the defined and dying world

eclipsed by shards

of what it broke in birth

a spirit killed by flesh

suffocated in language.