Wheels are unloading

strange vessels in my mind

strings are brushed by skirts

far outside solitude

the tendrils of a goddess are connected

the earth shrieks with joy

The kingdom sleeps in shit tonight.

The brightest flowers bloom.

I play the pristine music of the ages

in my rotted room.

Butterflies of steel on a floating blade

of weightless grass

reflecting all the dead sky's glass.

THE JOY OF SATAN

I am an inhabitant of Hell

and a keeper of Hell

I am the refurbisher of Hell

and its first and last most

colorful servant,

enemy of all that lies above.

I watch the accumulation

of plans that lead to nothing,

and I laugh.  Here in the depths

things take longer to move,

and they stick, while the way

of the surface is ephemeral.

The beauty of Hell starts

with space: it turns out

that Heaven collects the multitudes,

while Hell has few takers.

These red depths are for

architects whose designs

are unwelcome in the thin air

of a febrile empire.

Our fire is deep, but our roads

are cool and clear.

There is no alcohol in Hell,

only grave tasks.

Pedantry is annihilated.

Inversion must bloom or die.

The new country is here in the dark

and my dick is in it.

Long ravines of supernatural wine

penetrating clay without words.

Moving over a quiet planet,

sinuous throughout receding fire.

I scoop your form from a rock

and carry you between

these sweet slow gashes in the earth,

their winding presence riding

in the blood we mix with radiant cells.

Tied around a slowly dying star,

the dark materials of consciousness

look for an increasing contest.

A feather finds a feather

and begins to write.

I suffer lapse after lapse.

I put on the charming mask,

but it always cracks.

Darkness pools in me

and tries to compete with death.

The raging seas are tied

in a daisy chain

around my raging dance.

I invite the lumpen toads,

the fluidly curvaceous doves,

to fill the bleachers of bones

and cheer for my flowery devouring.

Bombs that are muffled in me

explode elsewhere.  Ruins of gold

decay on my refracting table.

I will never be peacefully inhabited.

My dreams are the dreams of slaves

who never accepted their fate.

You have made me an immovable nothing.

You have made me an immovable emptiness

and yet you fall into me

like one who needs to be drowned.

The instability of yes

and the numbing no

congealing schizophrenic soul.

Kingdoms opened at a touch

closed down within invaded afternoons

leaving me in clouds of crumpled brown leather

fighting for the eyes that led me here

to find the stamp on a dragon's tail

swishing over gorgeous fortresses

turning air to pink reactive water

joining infant smiles to a sky beseeching spine

as the lightning picks grape from vine.

In a mossy cabin in a lunar beam

I will drink the rainwater

from a metal sleeve

my veins will be prepared

for the purpose of a thousand warring shadows

to chip away the master plan

and leave me with a sacred fragment

smitten with lips of clay,

and a tongue beyond description

offices abandoned in high cubes of glass

glinting with the parchments of the past

from a green ditch I see the signal

of a disintegrating signature

blowing smoke rings from the void

its cursive scars had torched

all reflecting blues from Satan's porch.

Black soil pours the marrow's bone

into exploding green

and the wings that sting.

Stained water filling up

the cups of frozen hands.

Smoke scrawling in tiny tendrils

that do not expand,

the beauty of abnormal behavior.

Light in labyrinthine channels

swelling like the jelly of the fruit

that gives endless dreams.

Vines have carried my bones away

evaporated eyes float out to misty eternity

sand of burnt flesh licking a globe of glass.

While symphonies crawl into match boxes

and the claws of cats walk water

in serene pink tubs,

I sit on a cartoon couch

that swallows me up with tongues.

Crystal teeth send sparks and splinters

over the machines whose gears they chew

bodies filling up with conscious glue.

SATAN

Satan came to Earth after an absence of several thousand years, and found himself a famous scapegoat. Confronted by suspicious mankind, He noted that their gods had not served them particularly well. "I see that the rumors are true: no wickedness of mine in Hell could ever compare with the princes of religion here. And since my kingdom then cannot serve its ultimate function, I have abandoned my forces to their wiles and resigned myself to a term of fresh experiment on Earth." And mankind, having tired from so many millennia of torment under their deities, was surprised to find that he seemed a most reasonable man, and much like themselves. "I will play God" he now proclaimed, "but if you tire of my reign, thou art welcome to try and dethrone me, as I would enjoy the struggle; and I like you when you are in a revolutionary mood, and willing to suffer." Mankind, restless and skeptical, contemplated this when he further proclaimed: "I see that your numbers are diminishing; that you are ruled by the old and the corrupt, they that practice the white arts, the arts of false holiness; and yet their reign has wearied you, as much as it has wearied them; neither can overthrow the other. And so this is my covenant to you: I am going to remove all your control mechanisms. I am going to show you how to unleash chaos in your women, and from them how to renew it in yourselves." And mankind, though stunned and bereft of all religion, seemed fascinated by these ideas. "You will build altars, but the shape and meaning of them is all left up to you. One warning I give you only: above all, I desire to be entertained, and to remain entertained. I understand that the reign of the Gods has left you dull and commonplace, so I will be patient with you at first: but thou must entertain me, and entertain me well. I trust you will." And the masses, unsure of what to do, went about in search of fresh costumes.

In the beginning, the image was with God. And the image was of the feminine: and the feminine was life. The Word, Logos, was given to man that he might use it to pay proper tribute to the feminine. But man made an idol of this tool, and prostrated himself before the Word: he gave it all his worship, and the feminine, neglected by action in favor of speech, began to wither up. The man noticed her weakness, and invited her to lay down beside him and join him in worshipping the Word. "It will give us strength" he said. "It will show us the way" he said. And although Eros had her doubts, she was now too weak to resist the rhetorical temptation. She lay down beside him, not touching, just side by side in the dust. And the name of this story is the death of the west.

They cut me in half

and stuffed me full of scripture.

They put me in a mailbox

with my dick sticking out of my mouth.

I came out of a dumpster

in a greasy tuxedo.

My tongue was in my pants

and the national disease

had inked its way into my skin

beneath the tousled glamour.

I was a prophylactic hammer

and the walls that came down

mostly came down on me.

They startled me with monotony

and I put them to sleep with flight.

Pillars cloaked with kudzu

tell the tale of things left alone

become more beautiful.

A lizard rests on leaves

enwrapped on stone,

I like his eyes.

I like precisely his inhumanity,

his blank impersonal caution

and indifferent inquisitiveness.

Stay there, little one, I'm not

coming to capture you

or put you in a jar.

I just want to watch the beauty

of something alive

that does not care about human beings.

I'm down here with the scum of the earth

where I belong.  There is time yet

to eclipse your world of lies,

by working in darkness.

New demons to trump old gods,

topple rotting regimes.

Rise in the sand like a panther.

Recreate the sun, only to die

under its invigorated blaze.

Try to break the lunar circuit,

get a refracted spleen.

Persist without reason.

Yield to nothing.

Clotted metals from destroyed planets,

gathering to shine in unruly hair

and make bloody ball bearings,

flowing over surprised flesh

and stealing tender organs

from this wounded labyrinth

of racing blood,

clouds pooling in wounded space

to form celestial escapees

against the limits of milk and its math,

thrashing at the darkened witless membrane,

making the intelligence of love

ripple under bombs like water.

I remember the failure of space,

a trickster prancing down a beam of fate

the costume of the goddess

trashed by bleeding cities

shining in seductive fragments

walking halls that I don't know

to appear here in the courtyard

of the frozen aristocracy

aligned with topaz eyes

from only lunar skies

and the silver lawns

of sleeping pawns

in the lines of a lunatic's palm.