I walk down marble halls
that echo nothing genuine
Birds scream in attics
Women blacken their eyelids
with soot and dab their cheeks with blood
fixing men with sharp knives
Down empty corridors
blood-drenched eunuchs
find mirrored doors leading where
houses of glass, frosted temples
dedicated to doom,
interiors streaked with black
stand abandoned in one of many forgotten infinities
Nothing ends, all remains
Each flyspeck a galaxy or a new dimension
Unfathomable glass serpents twine around silver trees
spinning gross tales of fruitless deeds
Empty bottles of physic
drunk in splendor
Wailing through the telescope
I hear birds in attics screaming
Touchstones, moonstones, tombstones
Dead soldiers rising marching backward from war
then Charlie Chaplin fast forward through time
No beginning, no middle, no end
Time concaved, convexed
The mirrored doors show us coming and going
Houses of glass with frosted panes
Mud puddles reflect dead men
with insect-breeding faces
Bullets flee from the barrel
of angry lilies like tack-headed hornets
nailing a blue cobalt sky
Baited traps of a pristine wood
The hyacinth dares not
one false step for its namesake
Lies and deceit leading on
The maelstrom swirls us back
We return to where we began
Birds screaming in attics
Nothing pure
Cymbals, chants, magical portends
Hopes built on illusion
Fear, the all-knowing driving force,
beckons us out of our caves
into new beginnings from old
It starts again
The spinning universe returns us
to the same old lies
The endless cycle
repeats, repeats, repeats
and birds scream in attics
