Postcard 144

Please tell your children that you are coming soon
Please tell our children that you are
Please tell your children of your imminence

Last night a sickly light scarred
the low hung steaming sky --
a load shot into the seeded sky

Tell me your children are imminent

In this morning's feeble dawn,
eyes old and wise, wings
spanning three meters wide,
the great grey pelican -- ocean's hound --
filled it's gulping beak the final time

And then, mercilessly, Leviathan,
oil covered -- a suffocating new blubber --
blood plumbed with mercury and lead
rolled its eyes back in its head, white
ribbed belly stretched to convecting winds,

Today is merciless. Wisdom is dead
Please tell our children anything

They are compelled to scratch
their secret name in open osseous sand --
our children -- exposed and bounded by
the scaly crissing crossing trails
of slugs, mucous webs

Our children signed a blind consent
and they will desert wander
they will our debts pay
They will grow mute illiterate

They will be burdened by old laws
scratched in cuneiform upon
chipped slabs of clay
They have signed away
in aggregate, inheritance

Please tell them their secret names
Please let our children know
the fertile laws of nature will
supplant the fetid laws of man

Postcard 143

The old birds move across the sky
they look down, lantern-like
at weary angles with the weary world obtuse
She follows them with long strides. She shears
She pursues strident and acute

The paper clothed ground peels up
and flickers like grey flame
Decrepitude falls away
flutters like old lace

Her legs lift ponderous like wings
She is leaving but wishing won't make it so
One by one the wings collapse and
fall along guide wires arsenic and lead
Still, she persists her vom'tous slog
near still against the blasted sun

The bird and her describe a whirl against itself
Then whirl against the broken back of world
-- all its armatures corrupt
its chemical sky collapsing into sea
The firmament slides deleriously away
Guide-wires burn and snap like filaments
Legs and wings astride as if willing
only made it so, they are away

But look, a smudge across the rarefied
A listless smile that is a primeval tusk
and two black shines that are
mockeries of eyes
The stillborn beast remains, a stain
and like a slug, consumes the world decay

There is a bright white -- a pelican
astride being of legs and wings
And there is a sallow white that is
universal consumption, a fade

Postcard 142

She comes to a cityscape.

The world cannot help but change.

Everyone and everything pushes out.

The city has burst unfilled,

a hollowscape.

This was a city of change.

Never the same stream, 

can't go home again, 

look on desolation angel.

Wide avenues lead to center, radiate

Only laterals crowd with argument and debris

No one, nothing meets or challenges her

but the blasted glass

ground beneath her feet

The sentinels are empty and everything 

remains is scurry scurry

Heat is frivolous

spent without movement - tangled

Everything pushes out 

against what it may find

looking out with 

city center empty eyes

She stands at the center that is like a weak star

Broad clear avenues radiate like light

did it explode? did it vaporize?

did it collapse?

She walks upon ashes and looks around 

clear blue. no second sight

The beast has been still-born and yet 

has lurched away, pushing out.

She feels the threat of violence inevitable

That is one thing overcome by another

Push turned inward.
She breaths it finely in

Her hands are metal black
what did she touch?
Somewhere deep, there must be clay and hummus
untouched untrammeled unstreaked

The suicide air lays acid down
from chromium clouds
from quicksilver skies
The earth pushes up its alkali

A shadow flits across her eyes
Then another and another still
Some ancient creatures cloistered up
ooze across the formless sun

The wings push down
push down Away
She pulls up her feet and follows
Every girl in this hostile world
needs walk on, every girl needs a dog