Hiding In the Sky

I

They're taking another run at Jupiter tonight,

    Those folks tornadoing around the fire in the field.

Mice chase crickets between their feet.

Mice that do not care about the ten billion congealed lights

    Sketching themselves into existence overhead

    As they plummet towards seven billion hearts and brains,

    Tickling the heads of scientists in their interrogation chambers,

    Tongue-teasing the fingers of writers and musicians with snowflakish seduction,

        Sending pens dashing, skittering, dancing across paper

            And fingertips across necks

        In pitch-soaked throes of creation:

        Imagination and unknowledge manifested in unparalleled psychedelic glory.

    Lending a deliciously vague purpose to preachers everywhere.

    

II

The preachers really are everywhere:

    In sprawling marble bubbles in Europe.

    Gallivanting across Africa.

    Dancing about your house morning to midnight from their Alabama mansions.

    Sashaying across the headlines,

        Hip-bumping the deserving out of the way.

            The rough-handed house builder in Louisiana.

            The Buddhist in Vietnam healing forty-year wounds in a schoolhouse.

            The rabbi handing out soup on the streets of New York.

Politicians burrow into their pockets,

Chasing a nice, juicy, fifteen-in-fifty voting base

    On the back of the apocalypse

And penning hefty legislation regarding who you can fuck and when.

 

III

The stars are treated to a front-row view

Of the couples copulating between blonde strands of wheat enveloped in the night:

    Charging around with each other's organs,

    Chemical explosions flaring behind their eyes,

    Singing satiny lovesongs on deeply heaved velvet breaths.

 

After an aeon of cloying passion

    And an eternity of afterglow

   That swells and meanders like a lazy ship sailing a sunset-soaked sea,

They rise and drift about in places.

    Places that smell ambiguously of paper, plastic and new t-shirts

    With an undertone of old, cheap carpeting that should probably be cleaned soon.

        That hard, coarse sort of carpeting

        Laid down in squares of a million tangled grey synthetic fibres;

            Thorns that bite into feet

            And grab onto every speck of dirt and seed of rock.

They rise to drift about in places.

    Places soaked in the vaguely blue fumes of gasoline fire

    And assaulted by a clamour found nowhere else.

    Suffocating places built by the lot of us

       Places which will not breathe for another million years;

       Not breathe until the vines come to strangle new life into them.

They rise to drift about in places.

    Places that do not give up enough food for their children

        Or books for them to read.

        Or brains and bodies to teach them how to read.

        Or any water to quench any of their thirsts.

            Thirsts named Knowledge, Necesities

            And Non-Import Freedom.

                The sort of freedom that we all own but have been told must be bought.

They rise to drift about in places,

    And they all return to sleep under the same night.

    The night that sets free their questions.

        Deep questions that roil behind gates in the firey human consciousness;

            The keys to which are held by night's moonlight fingers.

        Questions that keep the human race awake

            And scanning the ink in which our little bubble floats.

            As if the answers we seek are hidden in the sky.