“We’re getting ready for The Sound”

What had been flesh once melts from charred architectures under the strobing white and blue lights of the known. Hard to remember any longer whose flesh the flesh was when it breathed, much less what else it ever could have wanted to become in your America, beyond the flames they’ve trained to spread when something screams. And still so little light by which to parse, to tell the difference between seasons. Only the blank waves replacing silence stir the branded sealants, causing strange textures on your skin, the only still-remaining form of dream.

“In a siren made of terror / In a fate made of glass”

The Sound’s already corrupted all your files, as you remember; it cooked your nerves flat, replaced your teeth with teething prattle, turned your reason into gel. All your senses cooked dry on Petri panes that trill and tickle between disruptions as the heads of the state’s Divining Needles scrape the ground around your home for sacred thought, exposing only mile-deep cells of lard and listening devices. Hadn’t we built this land on something sacred once, still never ours? Is there yet no end to the names of all the lost? You force your eyes shut inside your head to try to think, and see instead there the light of a screen wide as the world had ever been, before our language failed us, before the Blank came.

“You rearranged their faces / But you know all the names”

At least the holograph you’ve been uploaded onto lets you sleep—it’s almost like real-time, still, however stunned. You still find pleasure, even, in parsing the stacks for evidence we were still ever actually alive, able to read a sentence, trace a day. For instance, at the moment you believe you are scanning over information about ██ ████ ██████ █████ ██ ██ ███, by a ████ out of ███████ by way of the ██, known as ███████, which you realize you remember had been on the turntable in the bunker just before the lights went out, and the landscape broke, and you were nowhere; a record that reminds you now, as nothing else can, how life felt from on the inside of the late years of a nightmare, before the eaves broke, and you could no longer remember any names, or any faces, beyond illusion.

“With no trace / Silence has a weight”

The days revolve; each already hypershocked, without a center; soon, no edges; then no size; where even as the record comes to an end, it’s just beginning; the blotted sky above us green and gold, older than ever; younger now than it will ever be again.

“Losing too is still ours;
and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom
of transformation.
When something’s let go of,
it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us
its unbroken, marvelous
curve.”

Fifth Seal: The Cry of the Martyrs

When He opened the fifth seal, I
saw under the altar the souls
of those who had been slain for
the word of God and for the
testimony which they held. And
they cried with a loud voice, saying,
“How long, O Lord, holy and
true, until You judge and avenge
our blood on those who dwell on
the earth?” Then a white robe

Or just plain out of sight for the arrival of the guests
And when the host comes back
You'll have a friend in him to burn all the evidence.

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.”

10 And they cried with a loud
voice, saying, How long, O Lord,
holy and true, dost thou not judge
And avenge our blood on them that
dwell on the earth?

I travel hard
And I find nothing left
Come down to find your whole life
Had all passed away

Ancestry dna
Reality tv politics
In depth cartoon analysis
Murder as entertainment
Streaming wars
Up-to-the-minute celebrity updates
Superbugs and stocks: repeated crises loom
Beauty contests on a Graduated scale
Clues about space that we keep ignoring
Nature erratically lashing out
Your favorite binging controversies

Aryan and Islamic brotherhoods
Quarantine policy (50’s ignoring the American Nazi policy)

She wants me to be her Nigerian prince—unbelieving I’m American I’m both sides

She showed me where her gardens used to grow and I gave to her, my extra skin, in return

I have to believe that we can speak and reach each other past the grave and the ruins of life we left behind

A Constitutional Replay of Mass Production

Regan acknowledges mistakes in Iran
American gun-runner convicted, then freed
6.2 billion or 2,000 more
Soviets to test again
365 years as a spy
Airline finds bomb in woman's luggage
Ten minutes to halftime—a horrified nation looks on
The indestructible compact disc—played with lasers
Threaten records and tapes with obsolescence
Boy genius, grown old, is dead.
Meanwhile the boss returns again to the bloodland
Teenagers inside a Pentagon computer
Hostages freed while jets explode across the seven seas
30 Italians 5 Belgians and a Frenchman sacrificed their lives to the Sun
She prefers a song with a subtle or obvious message
For the rioting and songs to be down, police drop the bombs
The community burns
For the mayor to make Goode on his promises
They’re all forced to move
Then they’re all forced to choose which of the Cokes is the real thing now

They’re waiting for Godot
or the next Mondale
Ferraro
Ducaucus
Nader
Dean
Smith
or Clinton to save them
Or set them free
Or else they burn bitter meats and mortar block

I want these lights all the time:
In the bleak backrooms of the Summer
In the pale realities of responsibility
In the sexless banalities of daylight
Or in the sacred and fading arms of Christmas at Home
But here in the echo chamber, there is no relief
An old man dances
An animal sings
An infant speaks
Selling insurance
Unattainable luxury
Poisonous and delectable delicacies
Accessories to outfit distraction
What its there left here to understand?
Give me that tin mercury sound
I want the thin mercury until it poisons me
Hint at something interesting just before the crash
Then see it all undone

Some of these questions don’t belong here
Some intersections shouldn’t cross paths

Misophonia

Flashing back and forth
Through the time before
This alone
And inevitable dying

We’ll be ok through the darkness

In this self-consuming contradiction
Once more around the sun
The more it turns the more we just deform
While we spiral out singing
Of the things are ours
And the things we can claim
Humbly and in good faith

We’ll be ok through the darkness

There’s a man made of skin and hair and nightmare designs
His spleen stains the papers
His sex splits the headlines
He only lives through infection
Strapped ‘cross a waterbed
Kept alive by ad men and the alchemists
Up in the hills overhead

Where they force-feed him compliments within inches of death
And bring him back every time to repeat the process
Broadcast his resuscitation on the nightly news express
He only ever comes down for Columbus and Easter Sunday
To stash semi-automatics for Civil War reenactments
And be seen in his new robes for the passion plays
He wreaks of everything
Fit for an uncrowned king
His pale, undead hand is hungry and crumbling,
Fingers its way into everything

But the cultural ratings agency has tuned out
For the halftime show at the title bout
They flip the underworld over
From the inside out
It’s the same minstrel show that premiers every night
To give Amos and Andy a break from the fight
Where they post the big numbers to multiply and divide
And subtract what remains of the ghost of white flight
To give self-justification to the flickering spotlight
And Page 3 in the Sun just a little more light
And grant Dahmer and McConnell equal opportunity rights

The Jacks and the Queens of simulated experience induced his trance
Disgusted by his hind-legged, upright audacity
They blind him with knowledge then brand him with misery
Brief the ministry of sound to have him tried and committed
For treason and anti-intersectional tendencies

Then they send him out to the briar patch

At the trial for his voice,
Mercenary ratings agents from the the cancel culture gawk on—
Bloodstones hot in their hands
Calling for the Consequence

Dance like a monkey
Chatter like an Ape
Put on the jacket
And the full face
Everyone will applaud

At the Network they hanged the new American flag
The heads on sticks debate and then rate its degree of patriotism
They fattened and flattered him
Flattered and fattened Napoleon
But they neglected the slaughter, caught-up in their frenzy
And now he claims king of the air and all the beasts of the Earth
and the fishes of the seas

Black tile mascara smears
tears try to change her face

Trace a map of a human heart
with the words that can’t retain their shape

Say the shape of a human heart
with the words that never seem to form

five hours of exile cried
through a crack in the bathroom door

Angel Eyes that deliver you up
but you’re born a little premature

And he’s dangerously more naked and much less romantic
Than the rooms and saloons of the legends would lend.
He’s laced in white silver to select and to fashion;
Rehearsing salutes to 4D fornication
Grafting his own skin to pervert conversation
Of the sex and the sin and the softness of love
Of the news of the world that’s below and above:
Of unspeakable joy and the pain that it floods
Of the unnamed hatred that poisons the blood

And he breeds it together and calls it creation
With foam from the mouth
Unsanctioned indignation.

A live studio audience followed his call
A third of their tribes crossed the picket line
Protesting and moaning their Eradication rights
Over their identical twin nemesis
Forefathers and sworn enemies
They share the same language but feign misunderstanding
To carry-on combat
Dancing with the everywhere adversary
Always already undead
Unnamed
Unseen
Unheard
Anonymous and anyone can subscribe
To the letters sent by the secret mail
And they’ve asked into the mirror but it refuses the tale

Angry little pigs
Hateful little men

They rearranged their faces
But you know all the names
They try to change all the words
But the song is the same
Though the change and exchange is subliminal
It’s all the husbands and bridegrooms of privileged dispossession
Laboring within those electronic fences
The keepers of incurious imagination

But you know all the names

Here they come in the echoes of glory that they’re trying to repeat
Here they come a half-illumination of what’s never been seen
Here they come like a million imitations of all the secrets you keep
Here they come as a crass hallucination of what it means to be free

Here they come with the souls of the black folk that they bought at a price
Here they come a fractured messiah for the deaf dumb and blind
Here they come with the rods under the eagle, it won’t spare you this time
Here they come with a cellophane erection for every damn thing in sight.

I want to come back into the eyes where I was saved

Before the sky goes black in the morning

And this silence finally breaks

Turn your face with a touch of her hand
and she bring you back to who you are

Turn your heart with her hands in the night
When she pulls you back into her fire

Twenty-One Love Poems on her lips
she’ll sing you back into the dawn

Celebrate but the night ain’t over

then we’re back to where we were before