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Dec 2011
Here we are again, in the deathmask of the city spinning.
The circumcised sea with its crocodiles and scars.
Never is the onrush of blood so violent the falsehoods
of the sky that drip neon on our heads
from desiccated clouds so true

This is the wild:

To the clusterfucked and cloistered swimming
in their bowls of soup and the scuttled
shells synchronous in their bass pulse beeping
to the blackhats who don’t believe
their messiah will ever come because they hear
the trump of doom every second of every day
yet they still stomp in their flatbeds for joy

and the prismatic dead who drag themselves from
their gurneys to march through the alleys
like tuskless elephants shoving their fingers
into the sun’s fumarole determined
to disintegrate into a mist of Krylon and copper

where we carry our concrete world slung
over our shoulders and the ravenous
moon in its ellipse above beached night heaving,
eyes curling in their sockets like gunsmoke smoldering
hearts humming like taut snares beheaded fish
in front of us, beheaded bodies behind us
I drag mine along by the hair.

To the children and the panhandlers who greet
the lion like hello kitty
and the skittish magnetic few in their
lightning-spaded furrows
on the ecliptic chained but leaping ever farther
and higher like the wrecking ball’s pendulum

and all the naked lost milling among the mummified
tenements, waving Geiger counters before them
as they wander  the sweaty street holding their heads
high as they grind flesh against flesh
pulverizing themselves into rubble

measuring the toll of time by destruction  
drinking in mercury and hard water and
shrapnel and gamma and fire and gold

to them I say:

turn your hourglass on its side turn
your hourglasses on their sides
then acknowledge me so I can die in peace.
Ari
Written by
Ari
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