Stars glow red and every cell has death drive.
Rivers -- metal ochers, metal yellows -- like bony fingers reach to sea.
Big waters barely beat.
Big waters filled with skeletons of all things,
like old coral, oily algae green
And the surface is a sick skin,
a fever sweat for greasy rain-starved winds.
A new clear creature comes up from mud,
and squirms grub-like from sulfuric chrysalis of debris
She does not slouch toward pestilent future or from corruption of past
For a moment she is pure and unseen
She opens eyes as blue as treasure-held fragments of that old sky.
This world is putrid. Each step sucks up the smell of sour decay
each shuffle through the plastic shells of shotgun wadding,
old bent butts, of straws and bottlecaps, clears infertile crust away.
Each step pushes blood poison, brown and veined, up her legs
She moves to exhausted alkali -- the world as desiccate as leaves
She moves through and to a place where other beings might be or might have been:
the strange mindful intention of piled debris,
hard ground stained by dirty fires,
corners strewn with dried black chips of feces
Everything has one property to possess and share: every being has a smell
Every sheet of paper, bound and stacked, every book, broken spined and outcast --
all dim deciduous memories, trustee of image and word --
withers in the infrared and speckles green in mildew damp
and smells like old pornography
All things, beings all, are death drive born
seeking, starving for the echo source
of clear and bright and clean
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