The lights of the skeleton

have gone out.

The shadow still stands

like a blade of iron

with branches.

A smooth stone

rests in my hand.

I will break

the ice around my soul

by not throwing it.

Fences glint from the outskirts,

the wilderness is coming closer.

The fortress I left behind

is a ball of wet paper

caught up in a crooked wire.

The ledge sweats underneath

my ticking frame.

The cliff's drop tells me

I'm a dragon's tongue,

watching from outside

the airtight windows.

The tinsel of roads

is a rope of roaches.

Its net catches thoughtless dreams,

the bones of the hopeless.

The cave that paints my mouth

the moons of my many seeds

the runner that wrote this.

Paths part in the bud

and fornicate with the aftermath.

The staff without a flag

punctuates the desert.

Waters gather in the cloak of the ground

and sing to hell.  A numb claw clenches

the clapper of a ringing bell.

Roads that climb across the valley

washed by rivers, scrubbed clean

by the grains of blind bodies

as ornamented trees rise

from a broken spine

and painted tongues lash

from painted faces

I follow the web of water

suspended in the wake

of a fleeing sun

the carrier of ropes that run

up to their cranking pulley

with a robot's face and fish teeth

the glint of a barbed wire wreath.

I am from the winter.

I ignite the curves

of astral lakes

as I ascend throughout

the worlds.

Black holes break upon

my wingless wonder.

Dawns come and go beneath

no overhang.  I open like a lung

before a rain of dead matter

then cough it out as a spray

of gray moths.  Their patterns

iridescent take on many shades

one orifice of galaxies arrayed.

In the attic trying

to decipher the great book

he shot himself through the mattress,

traced in luminescence

from the neon signs.

There was no answer from the void,

no croak of hinges.

Dreams filtered through

the violation of consciousness,

the turbid mutation

of answered prayers.

I'm so glad to be beneath

the weight of your shit.

I see the platform cracking,

the glad green light.

The serpents are shedding maps,

the undergrowth prowls

with its own tongue foot.

Sanctuary is in

the severed umbilical.

Aisles cool with vacancy are

filing outward from

the buckled sun.

We could walk there

but we wouldn't.  We will

drip down the charcoal cliff face

like veins.  There will be

no lasting pain.

Flesh translated into steam

out on the shoreline

where the scarecrows lean

swerving lines that fly kites

under purple atmosphere

boundaries fleecing flowers

from the fabric hold

of cement fences

coal running from around the eyes

a manic fate designed.

Born to roam unholy Earth

from the time beginning,

in a ball of hair,

lost in the high

cemetery of the wind,

a bench of stone to sit up there,

somehow.

Growing to love the languor

of death on the prowl in suede

alert to the tongues of midnight

feeling their fade retract dreams

forms coalesce on the curtains.