• “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