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The Legend of the Dust Gods
That was Bayonne years and years ago,
or maybe Paterson, not William's Paterson
but a Paterson collaborated on by Giger and Bosch
with credit for inspiration going to Harlan Ellison
and his angry, sad, snarky smile.
In those days dark clouds thick with
dark prophecy mated with exhausted gray slums
and turned into people, people with cleft
eyes and bloodshot palates and snakeskin
souls, dry souls rustling in the smoggy breeze.
Most of us were carnivores then, jolly
cannibals and Hannibals, grave
Casanovas wooing the Reaper; the
Reaper was such a sexy bitch, we just couldn't
keep our hands from roaming up her skirts.
The super-heroes didn't fight crime
in those cities, they were too afraid,
they wasted away at the Lion, a local
bar and traded tips on logos and
how to get stains out of a cape.
We loved it, truly we did, and we
gave thanks to the dust gods, the
dust gods made it all possible, they
carried us in clenched fists and let us
mainline love and smoke eros for a kiss.
Absolution, abolition, it all looked good
to a suburban white boy, a whole hell of
a lot better than hanging out, dead stare
sucking on a bottle of Pepsi, pissing a young
life away in the parking lot of a 7-11.
Once in a while the dust gods would
stir, Lovecraftian, epic, they rose
and surveyed and lilies for the dead
blossomed in their eyes, bursting soil
and tenements, jackhammer stamen, blasphemy pistil.
The dust gods, ancient as childhood and
more tender than a fascist dream marching
through the skull of a lonely young man,
subjugation to a more profound violation, these
gods were our gods and the jackboots rang their song.
Everything came together in their maw
and the super-heroes told tales of their
"Golden Age" and shambled home to sleep it off;
it went down in Bayonne or maybe Paterson
and we all woke up next to the Reaper
some as lovers
some as mere tricks.
Morning caught in spiderwebs, dawn
spun from the sighing sky. Strands
of sleep drift from drooping eyelids,
a leaden gaze, Arachnae's child, mourning
the curse of ages and leaden days,
awaiting the panicked pluck of prey.
Spin again, orbs spun across the
band of aurora glow draped on the
horizon, this child has eight ways left
to go and mourns with patience, spun with mystery.
Dew glistens, shells of dying diamonds,
crystal embers ablaze on a silken
device in the waiting breath of early
rising. Sanctified by memory, memorize
the symphony of first light languishing
in the nexus of the threads, the
climax of the weaving. This child
needs to feed and breed and molt, shed
the dry past, the husk that shadows the
future and hides the web's design from eight
searching eyes.
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