When the culture passed over:
we bathed in its light in its fear in its
mountain stream. We left mountains
of carts full of junk behind. We bade them
farewell. They bade us weep
and know shame
They bade us be hard.
Without power, I wielded
my body
Star wars & ax wars & the letting of blood. The last beast dies. And under the "starry arch of heaven" and in the "stony Middleworld of earth," and even in the "dark waters of the underworld," we celebrate over the phonograph. How the tune it plays echoes wetly. Like we're underwater again in the days when the sky was a crocodile, like we're the ones thinning the membrane: the beast comes back, comes slithering
The present sheared
asunder from its parent cliffs and all the past was just
the sound of metal
warming
at the edge of space
at dawn. Who'd hump
the wretched future now? To every blasted city
numbed and stilled—
the light! It came from underneath—inside the earth—and shining upward, through
the rocks, the ground, and everything