Anacreon’s Place

Hurting in time to the threnody
of silver rain, a prayer to asteroid
entities that could have been written
by a cloistered mage musing
on the burning of his fair city
in the month of Hept, entranced by
the Machine Dream, before
it had a name.

Faith is not
a light in the darkness;
it is darkness, and learning
to love it.

Farther and farther
into the catacombs
pursued by devilish
legions whose feathered pinions
always find us.
In time we realize
that they are us, and
we are they, in a dance
of mutual oblivion,
between lives.

2.
The farmer on a spindle-limbed walker tractor crosses the fields
with hundred meter steps. We marvel before remembering to flee
from the towering spike-encrusted giants
bearing down on us with malevolent sentience
and glowing eyes, whose bones are girders teased then
tortured from galvanized souls.

3.
When we step from our ships
onto the surface of the new
world, we see that its cities hyper-extend
across the planet’s pitted surface and pollution
sears the silver sky in ebon billows.

This reality tastes good, like
soul, a sugar that gladdens
tongue but rips stomach
with acid talons.

- From a Reflection on the Month of Hept, attributed to Harmon Maasel

This pain I can’t place

For Joe Strummer

Gentle giant, the thought
like a mother ship freedom bird
from the ocean, the word, the
sword, inflects the candor with
which he attempts to say
“I can’t do this any more.”

She longs for him to tell her
just how insane she is
so she’ll have an excuse to
self-destruct

This song is about
the luck of the colonel’s
frilly underthings he wore
under fatigues and flackjacket
at An Khe, where his brother took
a vc bullet for the end of the world,
and he balled up his
underwear and buried it
to police up his NDP.

The pain you left
on a foreign field,
the desire to rectify
catastrophes not of
your own devise,
what marks you -a diamond glyph,
gold burning through your forehead in the spirit
realm - is the intensity of your desire for truth
and to know God.

 The edge split down the middle
of a falconsight’s hefting ether you insist
doesn’t exist but casts spells to bewitch me
with every damn day.