Too many ghosts
Who’ve drank from the Grail,
Have commented on its peculiar shape:
A vital substance in a Klein bottle
Has nourished the metaphysical,
And gave it suppleness
Like skin, but without nerve-endings—
Like plastic
These mobisian volatilities have taken
All vertices outward, prisons of prisms
Are not special to the spirit inside
But the monstrosity appearing
Astride the Rio Grande:
Eyes and ears posted
All along the prism’s edge
Contain so many lives yet to be lost,
The arms of the ghost
Surround the outside
With rusted-over armor to keep the Fates
Locked away indefinitely
Beating, starving, and ******
All lives coming to the edge of the undead.
There, from across the impossible barrier,
One can see the astral projection
Of death-animate within—
What is a prison outside is, by definition,
A prison inside
Guarded by a lily-white panopticon
And its pale imitations
Kept warm and safe in the rebel’s undead embrace.
When the transformation happened
Is anyone’s guess, but by the love
Of a dispassionate hatred,
A distant, fever-dream voice
From a white house upon a hill,
A clarion made of echoes,
The prisoners latch to one another
And form the body of a great scavenger—
By the vulture’s keen eye for death,
It picks off those who cannot stand
On their own two feet,
Those poor, huddled masses,
In one hand holding the AR-15,
The other, a bushel of nooses.
The vulture screams!
Ride, ride you wraiths!
To the border, ride!
The invasion of pained flesh
Shall never break the adamant heads
Of the patriot’s ghost, hungering
For the blood of a place
Victimed by the very body
It sought to bury,
As the body labors,
Eats nothing but its pride,
Drinks nothing but the slop
From ****-and-vinegar soaked
Rags of American flags strewn,
Torn asunder, ringing them out
To, one day, make Molotov cocktails
So hot, their blaze could boil ectoplasm and
Finally rattle staid hearts
Thousands of miles from the suffering,
A distance turned artist, apathy and hatred
Become this new face of humankind.

The bombs bring us closer together
As they drive every body apart
Or so comfortable pundits claim—
We heard the angels screaming
Across the sky, straddling warheads
That pitted the earth with salvation
And a chorus celebrating Judgement—
And toward the otherworldly glow
Night could no longer be found
In God’s light, rising as a pillar of fire
From the great mushroom clouds
That filled heaven and hell alike.
On all surfaces, our souls remained
As our bodies faded in the foreground,
Our souls remained in black and white
As our cause faded in the foreground,
Our souls remained in devastation
As our bodies were painted with tears,
Like morbid excavations dug by planes
As our remains filled mass graves
Parishioners filled the holes in a chapel’s coffers.
We were brought together by the bombs,
Thank you, God, for this chance
To finally be with you.

Before me, endlessly
If that hideous fraud of humanity,
Where boredom and open contempt
Can be found ******* each other,
Spirituality inherent,
In the concrete of the parkway—
You can see it on their lips
A delicacy as they casually quip
About the quarrel of concrete and steel
Behind roadmaps and getting lost
Is a slave to every master’s destiny—
It’s obvious in the way they drive
So many people feel as though they’ve
Lived such fulfilling lives
It’s reassuring that no one on this road
Is afraid to die
We comfort ourselves on Nietzsche’s words
But such prayers get drowned out on the freeway
In the roar of busy, inward-facing cabs
Willing to maim and be maimed
Willing to **** and die
For a few minutes more,
Risking an entire lifetime
For a few minutes more
In stripmalls and McMansions
Along America’s thoroughfares,
God closes the window as he deadbolts
The door, seeing what we’d give
For a few minutes more.

The street was a plume of
Cigarette smoke and cell phone lights
Waiting for police brutality
As the man’s head bounced
Off the macadam and he screamed:
Help, I can’t breathe.
Speculations abounded from sidewalk to sidewalk,
Was he guilty, did he deserve it?
Is he faking? Look, he’s weaponized spit!
Evil’s banality spans the one-way street
A volley of pity and vindictive joy
Muting him, washing away
By a blue tide of boys seeking retribution
Pushing through.
They held up the gun over his head
Against his heart, tipping the scales.
The crowd, in applause or in anger
Swelled in number and noise,
For or against, brought together
By the chance to be featured
On outrage videos spanning the internet over
Right or left, the ambivalence of raw footage—
Those boys took him off
As the crowd turned upon itself,
Distracting it from what it gathered for,
A red flag waving in front of the bull.

That word, that word we throw around, Love,
Like doctors in the mortuary throw
Body parts around, hacking and dissecting,
When it is everything to our self-worth:
So vital is lost blood, lost meat.
Cosmetics of a curated variety seek to cover up
The channels of our alterity, those scars
Beyond deadly, tattooing the end, marking us
Disgust in polite company, but delight in romance,
The other, nothing more than a canvas for our work—
Love truly is a work of art, a work of artifice
With all the resistance of a blank canvas,
Much and yet so little—
I take this hand, upon it, twist the ring
Twist the *****, press the vices inward
Hoping to find sublimity
In a distant body, water on a far off planet—
In this ceremony, I crown myself
Dr. Frankenstein, with this body
I assume control
Until it, by its confused existence, begins
To awaken and rebel—
Every ides of every fantasy
And every little bit of every dead idea
Is sown together on this day of communion
By the old guard against
A background of bells and cooing doves.
Once viable flesh, supple and flush
Has lost its elasticity, running pale
Makes for proper cloth
On those inward lonely nights.
I ask, Are you not happy?
Are you not happy for me?
But, it is clear on the faces
Of mortified loved ones
That an aspect woven and frozen
By a dutiful hand’s dubious intent
The stitching is all wrong, far too apparent
What life it takes on, ready to destroy me
Cursing its life, a hideous, untouchable
Monster.

We were never meant to stay
In one place, neither seat nor heart,
For very long, but here we are
At rest, letting our roots take hold
And creep into the voids and pipes.
In spite of the human trope toward
Things which keep them alive,
It’s clear, by the way we must smoke
To get some fresh air
Away from the dust and self-importance
In the vents
That we have to **** ourselves
Just to socialize,
That, to go anywhere, enjoy anyone else
We have to break the rules.
My haunches ache when should my feet
From walking,
My back aches from stresses of the head
Not from lifting,
All this bodywork comes from being
Immobile, the pain of sitting still,
The new smoking—and what am I left with
But rootbound habits and new fears
Of diseases exchanging dis-ease?

These streets, who knew,
Are the perfect gallery
Of generational strife:
You say my pants are too tight
To be pickpocketed;
Even if they could be
Thieves wouldn’t find much—
You say my pants are too tight
And I won’t be able to have kids;
Even if they were
Those kids wouldn’t find much—
You say my pants are too tight
And don’t look professional
But smoke and mirrors
Have already choked the vine
And smothered the fruits—
Even if it were the pants
This monkey suit is doing me no favors