Pace along the water and watch the days go black.

Cigarette butts dance in the river, everything lackluster.

Neon planes above the oncoming rain

Jesus dances naked on the rooftops in silent refrain.

Go to bed bathed in blue light showers

The warmth of home glacial and sour.

Chase plastic laughter instead of a halo

Your faith is a dead weight and love is a gallows.

It’s not about being right or wrong,

Let’s dance from the gallows, howling this song.

We call it perfection,

We call it direction, 

We call it progress, 

We call it civilization, 

We call it enlightenment, 

We call it worthwhile,

We call it a reason, 

We call it a feasible option, 

We call it everything but its name

But it’s name is unpronounceable.

It’s the stuttering soliloquy of death and the human condition, 

Bathed in holy water, boiled on the stove top.

 Bleached of nutrition and going deaf from attrition.

The disciples keep talking over each other 

I can’t hear anything at all.

I’m crying and laughing.

Nuclear thumbs twiddling soundlessly screaming at the night .

The North Star going dull as we are forcefully blind to our sight.

Enticed by cheap laughs that we collect from the TV,

Hoping some angel might miraculously free me.

This indifference is embarrassing but we are glued to our seats

We hope that at the end it is the maker we will meet.

Then I’ll ask him with broken teeth,

“What was all the beauty for, a dead man’s wreath?”

He will look at me and say,

“Beneath my eyes a dark skull smiles.

From the first bones that sprang up from the Nile;

The mountains climbed and men sacrificed, worthwhile;

The pyres burnt and spears broken, war futile;

A trillion ages washed down and cleansed in bile;

All of it forever, beneath my eyes, a dark skull smiles.”