i greet the
end of the world

like an old friend

welcome to
your party

we’ve been waiting for you

what took you
so very long

what is this chaos but to say
another thing i don’t like

whose name you’ll not learn
whose contours remain a calculated gloss

gibbering priests speak nought speak nada
follow them into outer darkness

where everything is as it always & never was
where to breathe is to expire

a cocoon where you can safely abstain
safely not safely never

The aftertaste of our sacraments
Metallic, bitter

Take the gears between your teeth
With parsimoniously thimbled crude

You will pass through the flame, reborn
Finally useful

Or be cast into outer darkness
To decay unseen

In black plastic
In groundwater

Can you smell it
The stench of it
The decaying apparatus
Its gangrenous appendages

You’d think we’d adjust
Swallowed up as we are
In its belly digesting, revolting
We/Jonah attempt cure upon cure

When the medicine it requires is death
Let maggots & beetles do their business
Let us breathe untainted freedom
From—yes!—but also to

It seeks to gentle
What noble impulse remains
And chain to the rubric

Your loyalties must
Be led to corral
Bit by bit

None but me
Murmurs your several
Overlaid seducters

You must die in the coke fire says one
You must die on a cross says another
All agreed: you must die

So: Will you die so that others might die
Or die so that others might live
That is the question

It’s something between it and its echo
The graven palm folded/refolded
Until it spells parallel pasts & futures

It’s important to draw from that well
To drink deeply & diagnose how
Foreign & familiar it tastes

It’s words on a page somewhere
Tucked behind passwords & recipes
To read is to alter them

It’s a sacrifice worth laying down
Glistening wetly & still molten
See how its facets fascinate

It’s begging to be reframed
Stretched over new scaffolds
Nipped & tucked

It’s an infrequent engine
When started it produces
Oh how it produces

It is not meant to be spoken.
It is not meant to be a river flowing over & through.

It is meant to be broken down.
To be be teased apart.

It is the meditative act
Of construction.

Take the wafer upon your tongue
And feel it dissolve.

Receive the wine
And its petite flamme.

Now you know
That you don’t know

And that is the power
Of it.

again, again, mumble the magic words
perhaps this time

either the pony
or the inscrutable topography

no-one can parse
instead freewheeling madmen

erect mysteries:
gallows upon

which to hang
the contradictive

Did you make it to the other side?
I doubt it; entanglements abound
And direct you this way, not that.

The people and things who orbit
You have a peculiar kind of gravity.
They hold you captive to a system.

Of course it’s possible! Many things
Are possible. Yet many more are
Untenable, even unthinkable.

Remember the places where it chafes.
Work your fingers into the long-
Crumbling masonry and discover

A single unfettered brick. Can you?
So much depends on whether you
Can devise a you-shaped hole

And escape. It may never collapse,
Or it may have collapsed yesterday.
There’s no way to know from inside.

As for your first thought in all this:
Take them with you. How else were
These trillion galaxies formed?

Our father’s fathers left their cities
And built new ones. How then can
We not seek to do the same?

step gingerly we through streams
of paintings & become
subjects

in that plurality flowing yellow light
frames just so composed faces
each reconciled & atilt

not a memory not quite a memory
more a wish: frothing hooves flashing teeth
gentled

violence of perception tame tamped down
together finally laughing setting
down our brushes