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have you heard, did you hear of the dying breed?
who listen in the riot living in perilous danger and feed
the soul of humanity—while others kill and pound
the fierceness from the marrow of the snow.
and white flakes dry to their knuckles bleached proof
of the curse several hundred Puritans would send
down the sewers of descendant broods to then
in violent climate changing double helix
fornicate and beget and copulate the worst of them
for walls of steel and burning oil blessed
with the greed of toxic fumes rising nostrils
of the least and lost whose septic brain cells
would listen in the chambers of the dawning hour
breathing carcinogens from the burning flowers.
while in the mad house there was a girl beneath sheets
who liked to trim the tips of her fingers with glass shards
harvested from bottles vacated in the gutters of the streets,
she told, and when she’d see shining iridescent cards
of blood she’d mend the wounds of loveless boys along
the red-light streets of her coven. it was pain
and black blood that made her the most sane,
she said, and gothic-headed laid her smokingly heavy
whispers on the floor between hospital beds. eyes
lined with dust, we could watch the lights ignite her lies
spoken as truths she wished for, but it was us then blinded
from the dawning hour, hidden among the trembling flowers.
who lost their livers in holy times of the immortal stomach
while grinding away at the spaces already full of treasure seas
and bloody cloth, too scared to stop, too knackered to hear
another day, another hour, a full expression of the flower.
but who amble now in slow motion blessing each day, stopped
with minds slackened by necessity, who simper whisper
for each person who could still afford jealousy,
and speculate at what became of the fungi of the hallowed tree,
hearing undertones of urgency from the dawning sea.
he crouched so low it was like a steam iron
flattening the lengths of his uniform into grass
torched ribbons crumbling through woody fingers.
under olive skin vibrating earth was wet with his last
spit before he’d stagnate in the body of a soldier
rolling him like sands amorphous and swelling
outward and away by torrents and flashes of sea
and wrath. under the weight of rain foretelling
he tore through the wet mud forward with pain
as it drenches reality gripping the prismed tongue
of sanity with silt rings. but never easing in midstream
seeing a dead boy where he crawled in the green of
We Own Your Life, Your Weapon, the gleam
of insanity that drives, that leads him quiet
never shrinking at the dawning hour
present and breathing combat flower.
who listen and who write in the mass confusion
of a dying ethos wondering at the burning rains
and bending to hide beyond their disillusion
melting to the conformable masses with shame—
to minimize to ostracize to victimize mutations.
who wonder at the crimson call of isms
unbent by the draw and glitter of the prisons
when they take the dancing trickster from his hallowed whip
to clear the streets of strangers who feared the Northern ship.
the spider mother pounded her feet in the lorazepam
of grief, needing to be the bride and not the widow
long beholden to a traipsing and solemn hero
of the era. she still wore robes of polyester majesty
and bereft of liberty from the promise of prescriptions
losing her position as the goddess of her kitchen:
what did she have remaining to be sane and held
to, needing the bower of the swings and the trees
and the man who rose in each dawning hour
to listen to the whispers of her trembling flowers.
who would never glimmer, all dancing raw
as a catatonic addict of the unleashed Combine.
no, we do not hide ourselves our minds like a platter
unearthly with more colors than America can harbor
in its primary revival of arterial weaponry and bone
shattering against the sectarians’ sharpest bit of stone.
when they gave her a mask she held it to the glass
and it hid her shadows and it made her speechless
as she stared through the latchless windows to
the white fuming clouds thinning the haze
of burdened isolation of each day white smocks
took their clipboards left the meds. the sky turned loose
and weights burned above her cheekbones reduced
to salting the pulled linen across the room a waltz
resting in the base of a cup under shadow moons.
the best things must be the lessons in dancing
and might take an evening of trances
to write of the plumbiferous town in the burning hour
unearthly, cerebral confessing alchemical desire.
who, lifting nothing inside them carried desperation
on bloodless boned finger arms possessed by wasted
and loveless skeletons crawling ants across spinal cord
that had heard it said starvation couldn’t be cured
and where they pelted your rotted highways parting
enormous screams of
[SEE ME
SEE ME
SEE ME
HEAR THIS]
you motherfuckers of the detrital male monarchy
amassing salvation and bread as if it were your earning
and not the plunder of flowers trembling in poverty.
she peed in the protest bucket in the corner
of a college dorm stricken by the nightmare
of obsession dressed in green to go
to the lie detector mill changing as any wind blew
lake-bound. as she crouched over an anointed pot
she held her prayers silently for the end to
the monstrous aluminum burning wound
cracking itself each morning over her yellow ochre skull
without understanding of these greedy cowards,
she was born loud in the guttural need to smell the trees,
to see the dawn, to hear the speeches of the flowers.
who listen in waiting rooms across cities for Her call in all
the wrong spells, not outward, take inward and catch
fast before He burns it smokes it and executes
the willow and the embryo and the manifesto of the sacred,
the witch who draws lines for the beans
and feeds the grass that sharpens our dreams;
who resist the kiss of the reminiscence to greater days
where there was nothing to be had from the polonaise
or the apron. who listen to the listening and unname
the creature, untame the shamed and the framed
to loosen our denial and tear the hair of distraction
from the satisfaction of violence, who redact the venom
of the pigs who leached from plastics the lassitudinous laze
and frown at every father’s blessing of the maze.
who do not think but think and feel and wonder
at the telling of how to forget such unwieldy power
who know themselves without his help his stethoscope
his reasoning with pliers across strands of temporal lobe.
who speak when they speak and smoke when they want
unaided and carrying truths and watching the dawn
with the eyes of the goddess knees unfolded and stained
gracefully ungainly and wielding the weapon of their absolute rage
in a bronze cascade of manumitted flowers
who laugh with purely perfect sanity while they engulf your towers.
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