The Gladiolas Are Ringing

As the vines climb the damp stone.
Mice dance with death.
The flowers rise to meet the mud and
The mud assembles to forms hands.
Maybe there will be more rain,
The snow remembers the snow.
The sun remembers the sun, its energy memory
And it’s in all of us.
Long lists of relatives are burned
In effigy.
Laugh at the orchestra of corpses,
The traveling circus of puppets.
It’s stopped in town, a healer grinning
Under his mustache.
Please do not disturb the sleeping hermit.
It is his work that interests us, his fortune,
His senses. They will save us from extinction,
At least that’s the hypothesis.
We have taken prisoners in the meantime. Hostages.
The medical trade is down to science.
Brains and feelings are basically one;
The Loch Ness Monster feeds on our young.
Computers spit daily hexes
On the still living. We are blanketed in numbers
Which sear our flesh. The stars retire to their bedrooms
Scissors in hand.
Survivors fight wars made out of tissue paper.
The sand is enamored with the sand, the frost
Hasn’t come in sixty years. We’re becoming accustomed
To the smiling faces of unrecognizable foes.
Roses bloom on the hearth, in the black wood.
Sea lions crown another man king, and then behead him.
Let’s raise the flags of our ancestors--
They mean something still in our moldy minds.
Pickled fruit shaped like our genitals,
The heads of grannies in jars, their eyes
swimming with wealth and the sublime. The man at his work,
Hammering new Bibles onto the surfaces of seeds.
A cat’s skeleton has been erected on the mantle,
The house a new museum.
Of course, its teeth replaced with diamonds.
More for us.
Lose your way in the topiary garden of time.
The trees resemble three generations of seers. The animals expect nothing and
get nothing. Spiny like the urchin, crabs, palm trees like exploded
firecrackers, fly away to Spain.

Unearth dinosaurs again and again.
An egg is everything.