written by: James Perkinson

I move my eye seeding the Holy, I move my eye

i see you


great lumbering limb

stretched like a wand of medicine

conjuring sky, the snow below

your arched hands a mirror

of the white horizon rising un-seamed

shroud of the season, full of ancestors

and dreams

the city slumbers, sullen, cement and silicon

silent before its fate, the frenzy of lights

a mere memory of night now, black-pocked with

bright, faded to this indistinct sheen of nullity

the great waiting, the stillness of a late coming

answer to the cries of bloodied abels and mothers

whose daughters herod slaughtered even yesterday

cauterized futures lurking in the height of the serrated

bark, blossoms whose spring lies buried

like a ring of volcanos and oil, shales of the north


tortured for their earth-rending secrets of seas


now forked into cars and wars, fleeing the


certain haze of extinction, the blaze of a burning


planet, tsunamis rolling shoreward like liquid


comets, the vomit of middle passages of the all


the unsung losses of orcas and seals, squid


and coral, the sorrel horse of john riding the winds


of ancient shamans like the drum-beat of mars


reaching the far edge of the living with star-messages


no longer discerned beneath the blanket of orange


locking huddled masses into a molasses of slow-jelling


lies, eyes blinded by light and unrhymed motion


no cycles of magic potions of dying kin birthing again,


inside the compacted engine of bechtel and gm, monsanto


and ibm, wall mart and wall street leaping straight into sheol


without even a grin of understanding, burning and burning


a million million barrels of oblivion in their bank accounts


the flanks of the mother heaving, the ranks of zombie-slaves


rising, carbon-belching, methane-breathing, ozone-cleaving


cyclone-stirring rage of a billion billion ungrieved living


holy ones rendered demon-forms in the pornography of


wild beauty made into gears and digits and bullets, cutting


loose the girth of life from the bone of rock that stocks our


brief epiphany with a halo of symphony and grace, frog-laughter


and meadow-lark dawn turned into the final verdict on our raging


refusal to see, blind to our own face rounded and cold


in the eye of salmon and kernel of corn, sold and dead


on the table, without a mouth left to feed


or sing

what if your holiday comes


and there is no seed or milk or leaf


left to thank?