Place of Shards

Rain down like winter
strewn across the valley
night beacons for the carefree
warnings of destitution

Ruination whatever they called it
the ending death dissolution
the final moments as ribbons
of pain strike you like light

Frowning racks stretch the pain
into gigantic castles lined in needles
and you run at the walls
perforate your skins

change the timbre of your voice
laugh an octave up
shave the stave of its bleakness
clean it of the clues that activate

motivate and eradicate you and you
pick them off like numbers
these men and their inner pandas

lumber and tumble like rats in the cleaner
neocons in nautical mysteries
the facts of death spelled out in the literature

Temples
Heal in the holy shrine
wade in their unique waters
gain strength again to face the
crowds

cables drawn over the meeting places

the boon shaker of vague seed
the farce and invariate responses
some hits arrive years after their release
being noticed mattered, you had to be good at it to be in focus
not something given out but due to hard consistent work
work that I had not done so expecting results
is like planning to win the lottery by investing your life savings
in tickets each week for the next forty years
then you can forget about it focus on somethng that mattered

echoes in the flesh
carved out by yesterdays
all their purple sin machinery

brought out and presented like weapons
these carnivorous machines strike up a fiery dawn
and returned service personnel routinely lost it
in this endless struggle against identity

sentience being replaced by logical function
extrapolation and no off switch
the road to catastrophe no longer can we prevent it

we gather at the helm and watch as a meteor brushes by on one side
of the Earth, such a near miss, how were we to know that at the same time we would hit by
one so large that when it exploded with heat it was with the shockwave of 20 Hiroshimas
you can imagine them getting a large parking ticket for burning every cell of the city
but this was nature and really there was nowhere you could stick it, the office was never
noticed and the tides in people’s brains went into reverse

we marvel at the drama and recall the trees flattened all over Siberia safely a century
away now our children need not worry said a thousands mothers a second every November night across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, India, Thailand, Myanmar.

Nobody will know how many perish in Bangladesh
We are afraid to add their numbers to the agreed total
The unaccounted, ink records themselves washed away
infrastructure everything extinguished
nothing remains but the scarred landscape
the broken houses and cement disfigurement
the rancid stench
of yesterdays lives

and still the world is burdened by our footprint

Dec 2014