Cyberdementia

When the smoke clears
and the dust settles:

as the dark clouds gathered

a hole burned clean
through the year
its edges

not fixed, finely discrete
a jungle lair, tar-oozed
rimmed by sharp-toothed

carnivores, ripped meat hanging
threadbare
tendons stretched

over scream-laden mayhem,
savage dark-barked trunks
thick in the melt of arms,

bleeding shoulders, bruised barbie-blue
backs tied to limbs, hands beseeching -
a free-fire zone, the rim

seared, smelt in death coiled
round a wrap of white knuckles,
tight-lipped as lianas - anemic

tendrils to embrace
the vacancy within - its
attachments

…and the rain began

LoveBeautyTruth, tears;
words all words now choked
in the throats of the disappeared (

and what a year it was, my love
as I approached you with such
horror and loathing, still

we took out your useless
eyes /and mine/ offered up to the
empty sockets
your desire and the endless
obsession with madness )

a cranial caballah of twisted
birds - dirty and crazed - and
among the branches were
songs of a broken neck.

At the margins, riddled with cancer
unbreathed lungs had collapsed
into unspeakable fetal deformities
of every description

-- there simply wasn't time to abandon them --
so we smeared ourselves across the divided
eidos, the live and the dead alike
dragging our unsaid cantos

lipless from mouths hastily stitched
onto sagging breasts protruding from
the soft-sutures of infant skulls…

here and there, a stocking'd foot
slipping into a yellow pump; a black
dress with high cheekbones folding
itself over a running-board, a lift,
an oak bench, …shuddering
"go with grace," somewhere it said,
amidst the fountains and the pigeons
miming postcards of Union Square.
And somewhere else, the torn litany
of family stripped bare and shattered
in the clauses of "who owns mom?"

Gone! These ghosts of ambulatory
memory, their various stages
of undress and imperfection
as indifferent to the walls of begin
and end as to the catastrophe
that set them free,

and the disc of the world was erased,
and the words that conjured its existence
vanished with the light --
burned clean,

…splattering the concrete with absence

to be in the future, from the nothingness
they arose, dustless motes of something
as ephemeral as data,

the irrecoverable no-thing
into which the whole of the world
will pass and only faint infant screams,
voices irreparable and without impact
set loose from a future that refused
to contain them - Ghosts!

… the spreading stain of gentian violet.

© 1999 red slider. All rights reserved.

Back to Lobby