In the back room stood an altar in the dark
where good men weighed the cost of what they made;
they bartered one another part by part
and called the bargain work, the loss a trade.
It passed as work at first: a daily run,
a language shaped to hours, sums, and need.
Good men replaced good men, and one by one,
their names reduced to figures on a sheet.
One day they chose a righteous man instead
and named the choice expedient, not base.
In time, the work required a hand that bled;
the careful men learned execution’s face.
From then on, meetings logged the downward turn;
their words were sealed like prayers, then left to burn.

He kept a briefcase in his room,
a numbered lock, a loaded gun.
“What’s in it?” Nothing. Just a shrug
the way a monk seals up a tomb.
A year of nights, a silent proof;
a secret tucked behind the rug.
Too young for badges or the trade,
all bone and reach in undershirt,
just street enough to film a world
where men spoke easy into tape—
gang lore, a birthday stolen late.
I guessed at film, or cash, or dirt.
He drank. He warned me. Click by click,
the case gave up the girls they picked.

or Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

I waded in the sea when the great fire raged
and gazed at the purple belt of Orion,
too far to hear the cries of the first brigade
and the deeds of Ofonius and his men.
My wife had whispered in my ear too late: flames
like wild horses circling the poet’s hill
scattered across the gardens of Mæcenas,
idling only when the winds grew still.
Yet I rode swiftly past the burning tower,
far above the embers on the Palatine—
I sang to my children in their woeful hour,
moved by Lucan’s tongue and Seneca’s mien
to comfort every orphan in the Field of Mars
and avenge their naked grief beneath the stars.

There is a window cut below the shin
where flesh and omen meet in calibrated light—
the measured grind of progress under skin,
a city yoked to burden, not to sight.
When one arm lifts, the trusses misalign,
their angles learning panic by degrees;
each span goes taut, a nerve along a spine,
each joint remembers weight as if it sees.
He coughs. The ovens answer with a roar.
Bellows collapse. The horizon flashes red.
The Captain mans the gait once more
and shifts the towers toward the city’s edge.
The legs descend. What held becomes a fall,
story by story, crumbling wall by wall.

I. The Map

Bunker-busters, daisy-cutters, kill-boxes, drones
slide into nerve, a gospel learned by rote:
desire refined to numbers, weight, and zones,
the body lifted cleanly into statute.
We sell it bright—the tagged, the priced, the blessed;
maps pulse, a breath held under screens.
A crater opens: children stand half-dressed,
all orphaned by the grammar of machines.
We know the land by how it takes the blow—
its passes flare, its lakes consumed by flame;
the caves inhale, trade routes go dark and slow
as patience tightens margins into gain.
We kill democratically—fire, food, and law—
and call the silence afterward withdrawal.

II. The Ground

The morning came incorrect. The light was thin.
Smoke stayed where rooms had been and would not lift.
We walked the street and found the street within
itself, collapsed by heat, reduced to drift.
A kettle split. The clock had lost its face.
Walls kept their angles. Doors would not align.
A book lay opened to a missing place,
its margin blistered past the final line.
We counted shoes, then stopped. The count was wrong.
A child’s name would not fit inside the mouth.
The well ran black. The radio stayed on,
repeating weather no one needed south.
Fire took the rest: the beds, the dates, the proof.
We stood. The day went on. The sky stayed blue.

apostrophe, I’m channeling Whitman—
he says that his atoms are rushing through
the veins of another revolution,
he’s quickly assimilating into
phosphor dots, trying to form a sincere
face—he is easing through our labyrinth
with a new heart, pulsing in the cursors
in a remote chat room at the first hint
of the apocalypse—now the future
is pixelating into his beard, his
singing hushed: A million Trojan horses
on the horizon are circling the skies—
beware the dark dreams spinning above you,
beware the dark dreams spinning above you.

Gushing Spring

I begin where the body meets the floor,
the sole unseals its mouth against the skin.
This ache admits the point where healing pours,
the way dry ground admits the rain within.

Great Surge

Between the bones, I work the knot to light,
and feel it climb, reduced to simple need.
What holds in muscle moves itself at night,
a pressure worked through fiber into heat.

Three Mile Point

Below the knee, the muscle learns the number:
one bowl of rice, then work until compelled.
The body holds the rise of hunger,
how far the fields extend when breathing fails.

Joining Valley

The hand goes slack. The trade is learned by feel:
to hold, release—remain upright and still.

Inner Gate

At the wrist, the passage seals the chest.
The heart kicks hard against a closing wall.
Air comes too late, the mouth compressed.
I do not move. That stillness is the rule.

Great Sun

The temple bears descending fire
a brightness set in force, a binding law.
What heat selects, it lifts onto the pyre;
what heat rejects is left exposed and raw.

Hall of Impression

Between the brows, the pressure slips—I grasp
not faces, but the burn that faces leave:
a sky that falls, a field erased to ash,
the look that means the future has been seized.

Bright Eyes

Beside the eye, the signal tempers sight.
The nerve is charged, obedient to light.

I. Solitary Refinement

At the hour of second sight, he scrawls
two marks—one holy, one erratic—
an incantation on his office wall,
like the sympathetic magic
of his primordial kin—whose curves
of ochre bison, hunters, horses,
the French so lovingly preserved.
He’ll be half-blind like them, forced
to squint while scribbling in the faintest light
where shadows move like feral beasts—
he’ll press his fingers to his eyes
to prove he actually exists, to cleave
the borders of his prison cell
in every hollow of his skull.

II. Horror Vacui

The noble savage is a mythic lark,
yet proves no less compelling.
How then does man outwit the dark
without putting out his eyes, or sailing
heedlessly toward the burning sun?
Must he lash himself—and his brother—
to a rattling chariot, and run
to death beside him for their mother’s
madness? His choices are more limited
than tracing filament through a maze.
Perhaps the ‘enlightened’ primitive
will cry into that boundless cave,
only to hear voices beyond the room,
echoing deeper into the vacuum.

III. The Persistence of Division

But then the office space grows dim,
the only light, his thoughts—refracted through
his bourbon, ice, and the tumbler’s rim—
a film unspooling out of view:
his final moments drawing near;
a flicker caught between this world and that;
a blurred frame for each passing year—
now ending on this faded photograph:
He’d always thought his wife had smiled
a bit obliquely for a bourgeois girl,
sunning on that imperial virgin isle
by a native decked in costume pearls
strung from his belly to his nose.
He gave her horns—the native, a halo.

When Venetia Burney first whispered that name
into her grandfather’s ear, you ceased to be
a faint albedo on photographic plates
on the furthest shoulder of our galaxy.
You were thenceforth Star of the King of the Dead,
Lord of Tartarus and its portentous rivers,
the ninth planet—destined to be neglected
by Gustav Holst and silver-winged voyagers.
More cryptic than Ganymede or Callisto,
you beguiled us with your scale and your distance,
master of the Eighth House and of Scorpio
(till The Epsom Comet cleared Venetia’s fence
and left your name swirling in her morning tea,
dissolved by earthly gavel and committee).