And

And their next mistake takes the stage and he’s dancing like an inmate on karaoke night, and, in the crowd below him, a congregation of biblists kiss their books and they sing from their psalters, and a murder of klansmen lift their bleached white veils to receive the madly blown kisses of their most imperial dragon, and a buoyed ocean of working boats foghorn in unison for what they think is land, and a pocket of passive resistance chants peace poems outside and their warnings are muffled by the confederacy of dunces and their generic disco muzak.

And a boy pushes a broken toy train around a dusty floor, and the purples of his situation are masked by the red, white and blue of the donated campaign t-shirt he’s draped in, and one of Saint Jude’s sisters drags him to his place and another ladles a giant spoon of nothing much into a bowl and the boy, yet unaware of death, simply wishes not to be, and the sisters cleanse him of his sins, and the future goes hungry.

And I weave with blunted needle another pointless tapestry, and the words don’t match the colours and the meaning starts to fray, and I pull upon a dangling thread and the whole thing falls away, and I’m chanting with the pacifists but I’m baying for a fight, and the hypocrites and lunatics contest the selvedge, and the pattern stays the same, and the backstitches are loosening, and night turns into day, and a tangerine sun rises in the east, and the West sets.

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