The First Vision

It is as if
They are now victims
Of some obscene assault

Strung up like highway men
Or black bodies in the South

Scorched by a seductive destruction
And set aflame by want
Of a real wasteland

It is already there in the twisted
Minds of the preachers
Of the rustbelt’s weary revival
Where rotten fruit is devoured still
By men that would snatch it
From beneath the naked feet
Of women and feral children

They are all in agony
Ancient-eyed as the metamorphoses of something
So abhorrently familiar
Dissolves below in the dreary, dreadful water
And they feel it burning but dare not hear it speak

 

Poison Moonlight

It’s like some kind of soul searching,
Spirit lurching,
Primal lust for purpose
Which flies from the body
With a faux-shoddy stress
Like blood from a gaping wound.

It will outrun your tired brain,
Your pain-pale flesh veil and veins,
And you will think that it is paradise
As you dance to the sound of the horses.

Shiver, grow weary of the ceaseless chase,
Sick and sick of preserving a shallow grace
That kills your body of flesh and bone,
As a stinging moonlight guides you home.

Yet to have known it for a fleeting moment
Is an ethereal bestowment that can never spoil
Like the language of manly sin that rips from the heart,
Or rises like the waves upon a silver-tongued sea.

Memoirs for Pallas Athene

Suffocated – suffering sour grace,
The solemn rain presses hard against
The face of a queer, quiet man
In the thoroughfare.

There, under a spider-like sun
He had proudly spun the likeness of a Goddess
On the pavement,
And bound the eternal enslavement of form forever.
But he did not see the clouds rise together,
And only when the rain began to lather
The gathered dust did he yowl
Like a wolf with a hole in its side.

This is where I saw him, struggling in the street.
Our eyes did not meet, but I believe
He will come again in the morning,
Once he has grieved for Pallas Athene.