Portent for New Kings I and II

 

These two poems appeared in my poetry chapbook, New Mystic Alchemy, published by Xpressed in 2005

Portent for New Kings

Refusing oblivion,

spectral pebble kings carved in caverned/castled rock 

make a shadow stance.

War laughs crashing on the salted sands and frozen steppes of fabled mythic anarchy,

their sandal-strides mark gated, blazing portals

to the sunken cities of hatred most unholy.

Atavistic battle chants roar savagely

in the bleeding ears of those who carve the carrion 

for cold competing gods.

In the mass grave-ditch,

bleached bones meld to make mountainous temples erected on fetal promises,

torn and broken in the forged-ore hearts of young mothers

caught contemplating the new religions.

Death's dominion is the rotting kingdoms of arrogant heir-sons

drunk-splayed on mock Hellenic bone-thrones

slur-evoking black and bloody edict tribal rites in the wasting, raping night.

Sacrificing their soulness to the immortal unabashed,

weak priests scream their blood-hell incantations to the dull sacristies of ghost kings.

Vile wormword enchantments draw diploma'd/bespectacled grave-diggers

to unsand museum pieces from torn tombs and raped graves,

the split ships shackled in Poseidon's sea-waves,

and the unsecret once-holy enclaves of the seekers of Anubis.

Speaking of honor as they ram their seeking into honeyed shafts,

the mad prophets and petty profiteers,

the sand-eaters and dog-tongued alchemists,

vomit white earth in fly piles—

their spectral elders crash-waltzing in black-ash crescendos toward Har Megiddo,

where the blind remnant armies of their final, failed campaigns 

stagger in wandering wait.

In darkened depths below the din awake the mystic horsemen,

borne of life's rains and the warrior's ways—

ground-shaking, sea-earth claiming,

exploding forth, the truly chosen riding to wreak riots in the dog lairs,

their hoof-crash approach making weak-kneed the spectral pebble kings

who have laughed at gods enough to know 

new winds will blow their crumbling stance at long last to graven ash.

Portent for New Kings, II

Burrowing up in the fat flesh

of the mad king's mind,

the eye-spiders sucked and supped.

The rat/snake brain feasters lashed to god-right reason

and spit bleached bone outward to the shackled hay-sleepers.

With swollen rims of fire

the tear-ducts combusted, spraying sand-encrusted pyramid atrocities

and un-orbed revelations in an infinite line.

Scarab-priests (the spear in the spine of god) 

drank culled wine from the lacy veins of angels' wingtips,

splashing forth in titled waves and death-pledge edicts.

Nebuchadnezzar, Last King of retribution's false testament,

feasting on snake-waste in rubbled kingdom alleys

and longing for vegetable dinners, loosed a stone wrought of subtle sand shifts

and woke the rain-riders coursing the night road,

who drove out with a word the slave prince's blood liege 

and purged the palace of Inheritance's bad breeding.

Somnambulist multitudes, locked in the compounds of a confused populace,

shaken to awakening by the stale host and vinegar'd chalice,

traced the smoke signals of atheistic scorn

to the skull-kept wormwood garrison of righteous reasoning,

and found Death.

Burning the gallows-fodder in war-pennant revelry,

the new-sighted mystic minions marched on toward the three kingdoms 

and the disintegrating spells of the mad king's alchemist-fakirs.

Fought/beaten/devoured/forgotten,

the poor-paid last legions left at limit's last post

could not fend off the charging hordes of the eye-spider's crazed storm-ride.

Succumbing in bent-knee life-begging,

their hearts were dislodged by sixteen thrusts in rapid succession.

Her fabled king thrown and broken, the horse of the red dawn

played god in the wind-ravished ruins of the sunless subterrains,

marking pits for the souls of the wretched commons

and mocking the rain that raised the hay.