We and the Dead Ride Quick at Night

When the home is no more

When the mother's negative light goes also

When solitude rips the door from frame

When the transitory moves into the familial

Then: I often think of the drink, the notes, the contented, and badly drawn cartographies

On my bare face there reflects the dance of mapping out the fight

A marriage in mutilated shelter

To live like an animal just for a moment without fear

Or only a constant panic without distinction

A confrontational frenzy calmly composed

The way an evil might compose a coupling

My bare face exposed with its bright blood

All else melts into the plastic father

With his plastic horses

In a plastic rodeo

All awash in criminal seductions and an urbane consumption

I am a purple worm beneath your boot

Like my thousand ancestors turning away

But this new Helen of Troy has messianic ways

Waking as she does in pain

Letting the mice dance on

With their little distorted faces

And the money beneath their feet: aflame and falling

Onto the criminal's halo

The implication being that the thing cannot and should not change

That the saint holds her hair indecently

With the kind of pride inbuilt and structured

The eighth deadly sin unknown till now

Until we knew what to do with the approbation of devils, heathens, clowns, and the formal compositions thundering against us

We took an eye from the shelf and slapped it onto the face

We took un-constituted topographies and they quickly became the malefactor's apotheosis

A smiling Lucifer recalcitrant if viewed from above

Source: Against Heidegger (Omnidawn Publishing, 2020)