In the Metempsychosis of Bone, I Flee

Listen, the vogue tyrants hiss as they drag a vein of dark stars across my
weathered eyes. Listen, they command, while desperado demagogues
jostle for position in an already trashy sky.

From the tangle of a broken parade they arise, wearing tin and leather,
tossing batons and bloody confetti. Listen, they shout, like the clang
of armor in my skull. Listen, they whisper, soft and warm as the
talcumed thighs of a feverish whore. Listen, while ink pots burst open
and spatter the clouds with curses. Flashy tumors sprout in the Sea
of Tranquility. A veil of sulfur and serif gothic obscures the sun.

My eyes penetrate this stylish darkness, adjusting to disillumination.
All about me the masses are marching and listening. Marching and
crying for love, crying like the whine of stripped gears. Past newsprint
and statues and plazas filled with polished public shadow. Through
the market stalls with gold flies swarming on their faces and hands.

Some have been side by side so long their flesh has melded. They lurch
forward in lurid combinations. Others chase adversaries up and down
the shifting columns, hacking off fingers and toes. Even in the clock
towers of the high city where the laws are set, where the hours are tasted
and spooned from flask to flask, the ladies have complained of the noise.

In the metempsychosis of bone there is a land where ongoing catastrophes
are assimilated and healed. In the transmigration of matter, in the limitless
forking of time's possibilities to the Nth dimension of the dream solidified,
there is a land where I stand stone steady, my powers revealed. A sorcerer
with no baggage packed. An artist from an eclipsed isle, my beard a stark
presence on the blue sky of my shirt.

My tongue will be ribboned with light and my hands transformed to
antlers of incantation. When the moons of my nails are full and
brimming, I will climb the machicolated walls. I will tread the vaulted
arches of time and imagination, tossing winged rabbits and incendiary
doves to the crowds below.

Listen, I will tell them, before I vanish like wood smoke, like fire,
like faith, like the fleeing tendrils of the soul's transubstantiation,
into the boundless wilds of creation.

Appeared in Short Circuits, Ocean View Books, 1991