Six
Posting a mountain through a letter box, slicing winds and streams and
stamping flat
The greedy eyes of crows, strip-mined with desire, in tacking scraps and comings about.
Ambulated violations of the code set the sails of property and the mark of wakes,
Coffin roads are choked with vectors. Period. The map pushes through them all, cutting up on the inside,
And the hoof comes down hard, the silver slipper brands the ground and the cry goes up sideways
From the opened quarry. This chart’s a claw, tearing blood fathoms deep, loam spurts and
The compost heaps smell of tired meat, hanging out in the sheet of sky.
It is furnished, it is furnished, they cry, the veneer is meaningful! The shallows are full of grass
And skirt is cut from the plate, there is no way to leave, we’re all on Flatland now!
Flying circuses may come and fleets of cosmic battle cruisers launch in galaxies far away,
Locust hoards will vertical take off and land, but all of them are caught up by the hand,
And crushed. The universe only now creeps out between the fingers of the wooly cartographer,
The leader of squadrons, pulping the ooze under the synth drone. There is no homing beacon,
No cones to warn, just the lasting expanse and the rolling out of a final protester’s shout.
Apoclypsis cum ellipsis! Gorse abolished from a room; a sheep ushered from a theatre
Onto a landscape of fractions. The sum is over. The pixels take wing, murmuring.