There’s an evil in the soil here.
It makes a giant cathode ray with the mirror in the sky
And catches shard-slivers in its nets.
It almost never takes the whole.
It’s got a taste for the suffering it causes with
Forced incompletion. The most cutting
Loss of all is when they forget—
Most of them forget anyway—
That malice tastes sugarsweet
And mixes with human like water.
But the bile flavor of system failure
Breeds distaste in the heart of man,
And shards caught broken (hateful) rarely limp long.
I watch them,
Dead in their sleepless haunted walk,
From gaunt façade to gaunt façade.
It gets my hackles up—
Makes my gundog spurn all automatons.
With my auspices twisted up like Hermes rod,
It keeps ‘em guessing and staggers my lonely insolence,
With private smiles and a sullen nod.
How do I shake the world that I have grown to know?
How do I cut off the limbs that poison so?
When did that ray ever hang so close?
How the creeping blank pushed wedges in,
Like a covert night mission priest in a stolen habit.
When the leaving song is over, who is left with the bit
In their teeth? Who gets left with the lead soldiers?
Who is left in disease? Who gets to carry on?
What makes it harder is the love.
I knew it long and took its swell for granted,
And now they’re all distended mouth
And a low aggression—what moons
Does it pass in its warp and its woof?
What hard truths does it batter loose?
The answers are deaf,
And they won’t ever sign.
The people drink blood
From the fountains high.
They lap at evil with a mighty maw—
They suck pale from a tattered lie—
Like they’re all on the inside.
They give me eyes.
I never wanted suffocation
And I didn’t strive
To go misheard and under-understood.
I didn’t catch that quiet callow,
And I never choked down that vitriolic guile.
So I watch these halved pieces stagger zombified,
Through an empty life of near-forgotten lies,
All tarmac hellmouths and battle cries.
The cruel taste stains like a hunting knife.
