i.

Need all in the camel’s eye, bury the wind in ash, flickering haloes descant night’s winding highway, • descent of misty fingers lining faint lanes with pink doubt snaking ekphrasis notes until broken lines make • jokes of whispered pastel hopes, faint laughter painting the road’s hellmouth open, then closed, canned colours calling • •

                    ii.

out peeled petals of asphalt fracturing fractal tessellation tattle only hard-hitters know how to go on about, • animated lies just to get by, luminescent sentiment sent in to confuse the disingenuous distant their dissonance, • drifting dusk throughout this bulleted point of no return about we go, holding hands clammy with wonders • •

                    iii.

wet and untold, migrating mitts navigating mythological bones when structure ceases to persist and our flesh punctures • its leather with pores in penance for working up such a fuss that sweat just drips, lisps • and lingers languid on the edges of our fingertips as whispers dally on lips, poised to split, • •

                    iv.

blown apart, mouths cavern loud behemoth rips, noises no suture can prevent from happening again, not when • explosions in foreign distances din both from without and from within, this it, then, the world’s end, • desolation but not so desolate, soft-lit and sent in persuasive pulses in an attempt to get us • •

                    v.

off of this plane of existence, not onto another planet, but to ensure what mars ours fades • toward vividness, blankens this canvas we have for too long veiled our discontent in, satisfaction of new • vision manufactured by sudden inspiration breathing rebirth in a kaleidoscopic hostility of a nuclear instant, shattering illumination • •

                    vi.

to particles waves carry away with centuries of ignored worries, how in this exodus our feet crush • pavement the poured stone of which survives every annihilation, denying even our self-destruction so that its track • might snake a path toward what part, what anticipated act, comes after perdition, so hard this road • •

                    vii.

an oiled back recoils no more under the weight of its makers making attack on soil its • viper horns over as trumpeters tower their warning siren stifling laughs across the desert’s glass, mirage or • mirror, here where sky meets ground, heaven relents only once to send in, to let down, what • •

                    viii.

sounds less angelic, less majestic, than it does ominous, a song we follow as we traipse a • long chain of linked fists, ears trained by what we cannot unhear to plight our way to • where sight reveals what all along we all should have revered, the edge of the world where • •

                    ix.

words return to their inkwell bowl, the earth’s bowels burning kohls our eyes deprive folios and letters • and ledgers the final accounting, the final reckoning, of their blackened holes, if only we read what • was foretold before we cashed out, let things get this awful, greed will, in the temple, blind.