Looking down from over their bodies - I count them.
My split mind at once rejoices in and recoils from that counting.
Peering back over my shoulder I make
dark associations.
It’s as if I was afraid of becoming lost
the way the bodies made a trail like bread crumbs,
leading back from the places I had been.
I walk with the Holy Light.
I walk with my dark companion.
I walk between the spines of the body shrikes.
They harvest all my crumbs and remind me I am lost.
They hook the bodies high from spikes
so I look up to make the body count.
I can see the Holy Script
but I can’t seem to find the way.
Red and gold beacons in the dream,
flickering off and on like syncopated declarations
as if saying:
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am.
All elbows and knees I slip between the webs of the
orb weavers and the cactus spines of the butcher birds
while they count the bodies for me:
Here they are
Here they are
Here they are.
Hang-dog and hard of breathing I have my medicine.
I’m hanging from the sleeping cliffs over
hell’s half acre and the high deserts.
I remember my brother flying me to California on a great olive branch.
He fed me sushi and smiled while he watched by brain heal.
But I was coming for the bodies.
My count was smaller then, but it was high enough for him
and his hands were the keepers of the flame.
The fire there was exiled and quietly he laid it by.
My brother spread out over the carpet of time like
the faithful departed with the weavers and the shrikes and
mounted bodies in the sky.
A child appears before me on the walk - eyes like a baby deer.
His mother is two blocks behind, so he asks three questions while he waits:
Why are you smoking?
Where are your hands?
Is it getting dark soon?
He leaves me to wonder where my hands are and where the dark is,
the Holy Sage smoking at my side.
Like some dark sabbath.
Like some reading of the will.
Like some dark and holy delta sleep in a crib of red clay.
I have a feeling I have been gone a very long time and I
want to be home now,
but there is buzzing and chirping and a red light and
Saul of Tarsus holds a great tome before me and with my hands
I hide my eyes.
I am the dreaming of the world of dreams.
Therein the Holy Light rages like the flare of 1000 suns
while my eyes are shuttered tight
like old memories all gone beyond the sorrow.
The old oath keepers are all plates and screws.
The golden woven orbs and cactus spines are all empty on
the altar like a decommissioned slaughterhouse.
So I go and make a body count.
Shrikes (/ʃraɪk/) are carnivorous passerine birds of the family Laniidae. The family is composed of 33 species in four genera. The family name, and that of the largest genus, Lanius, is derived from the Latin word for "butcher", and some shrikes are also known as butcherbirds because of their feeding habits.
