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.

Vampires were rising out of the earth,

injecting me with electrodes,

wrapping my treasures in barbed wire

pooling my blood into an advertising program,

monitoring my cells for signs of revolt,

nailing me to a cardboard cross

and a defecated slogan.

Waking to the next dream, I was whisked

through imagistic air conditioning,

spat through duct after duct

chute after chute mastered by molecules,

beds flying from dissection stations

to reassemblage stations

calibrating with a snicker

monolithic to a fault forensic soul.

Pain takes on definition.

The seasons grow in shape.

Architects of mercy

turn to savages.

New lanes open in the way

they used to go.

Orchard of a waning hand

each apple with a desperate shine

and a seedless center.

We are partners in loss,

the contest is over.

Time will write

with its syringe of mercury

into the sea.  Magnetic zones

will eat up the suns to come.

I burn an herb whose name

I do not know.

Rivers of paint flow over

the bulging doors.

The end glows.

A chain of basins

galaxies in budding rows.

I went to the cemetery of unmarked graves

looking for a friend who knows

their names and places

to walk with and remember.

He was absent--I felt he might

be gone for good.  Without a guide,

I climbed the paths of bone-filled hills.

I don't know the names or their places,

but I know the spirit of this place,

its rhythm and emerging crests,

angles added by this tortured continent,

its heaving body.

I know this pocket of recycled cells

cooling between raw trees

and uncaptured breezes.

I have watched all the ideas die.

Yet beauty remains.

The dancer hides

her scrambled brain

with a fan.

I give her my life savings,

which is easy to do.

The stool turns

like a flying saucer

as I scan the polished wood

for meaning, am glad

to find none.

The lights of strange departures

are warping the dome

of the local sky.

An empty lake opens

elsewhere, filling

a depleted clearing.

Empty means empty of creatures,

crowded with lonely molecules,

meaning not lonely at all, and then,

never having been described.

In a cleft between silent neighborhoods

shrouded engines tick like dying clocks.

I wake up walking

on a rope between bedroom windows.

In a spectacular flash

I am falling through erratic air

surrounded by squirrels

who are also falling.

I fall asleep in anesthetic snow

behind a dump of discarded machines.

I haul myself up from dreams

to find books in the rubble.

The kisses of yesterday are far away.

Time is not kind to its prisoners.

I am glad to be filled with dirt

and among sinners.

Pines pointing and the deer in my blood

each icicle star.

I follow the arc of leaping stars

of all things not yet governed,

all things escaping notice or

never to have been, sweetest

valley of all, valley of oblivion.

Hilltops are crowned

with ruddy light, mist

binds the magnificence.

Streams descend from

rock gardens, many guardian

reptiles are in attendance.

On the banks of this great

transformation, I am not transformed.

I am found on rooftops at odd

hours, I am wandering with the damned.

I am still watching the natural things

bloom in their decaying way,

yearning for nothing to happen

again and again.

I swam in cardboard space

and surfaced in hotel tubs

appearing in the dreams of others.

Searched the houses of the dead

for keys they lost

to some invisible kingdom.

All the trails ended in darkness.

Under the architecture of the old stories

a new story was repeated.

Mountains of teeth

guitar strung vertebrae

night doesn't need to talk back.

Waves of haunted appliances

ripple after ripple of elastic shells

crackling to suck the fiber of animation.

In the edited flow of time

on the sand still hot after sunfall

one cursed and glowing seed

need of the infinite

crammed into this breaking cell

the glory of numbered beasts

this infamous coupon.

Wheels turning all around me

will continue, altering their form

rectangular mirrors will flow

sideways, carried by star spangled

beauties of the realm

for whose form licking frames

of metallic paint crucify

the kittenish image,

engines in a long line

to see the dance of a chartless era,

cherry villages besieged

by tumbleweed steam

the crossbeam's frost in stages

dining on resplendent plastic

draped in unmoving flame

blood colored vines on theater walls

these shadows in historic clothes

the light of a keychain galaxy

all rent for mending

the gears of unthinking voids

have found a voice

ferns of death are resurrection ferns.

Born on a hovercraft

drinking scenery from the baby bottle

watching the vast cat families

climb the wild trees

panes of an eroding game

claws toned on the bark that reacts.

Whimpers in the longest hallway

the accumulated palace enfolds.

Shrines there are beautifully

abandoned, sparse with decoration

lined with expressive teeth.

Lobbies of the cinematic tongue

clicking automative perfume lockers.

Paveways of the Truck-A-Lot Fantastic

coral reefs on either highway side.