World's Largest Insect

I’m lying on my back

In a dark field

Funeral pyre smoke winds

Up to the clouds like dark serpents

And just beyond, seraphim dance

And make prophets of petty men

Who get fire stuck in their eyes

Who dream dimly of stars

Who lick windows and kill rodents

And drip down between the floorboards

And slump

My higher truth is sitting up there somewhere

But I’m too busy

You see:

I’ve been working the worms from the soil

Lining them end to end

Setting myself into their places

The deep dark around me

And I’m sinking bleeding crying

We’re falling all

I’m torn apart by deep movement

The throes of creation unmaking me

Like petty men I’m taking the hands

Of ancient chieftains of ghosts 

Lonely suicides plague doctors, God weeps

“I WILL KEEP YOU WARM”

The earth howls in my ears like a broken thunderstorm

I’m lying on my back in a dark field, and the warmth around me burns bodies

I’m in an ocean of everything, and yes of course I was crying

My fingernails wind up into the clouds like pale serpents

Trying to pluck eyes from the deep space around me, watching watching

Seraphim eyes

A crescendo of madness 

I’m bleeding

All around me the dim prophets burn their black futures crispy,

And I’m sitting there watching them weave tree bark into baskets and fill the baskets with nothing 

And I think, “damnit if I don’t hate them”

But I’m still down there watching the metamorphic layers merge and ebb and flow, and as they pull me I’m glowing

White hot metallic blood my iron rusts away 

Pushed down to diamond rot

And one million years later I’m pulled back up and pressed and ground

I wish I could be stone

I wish I could be ordinary

I wish I could burn in earnest

Why could I not die softly like the sun.