Shuddering energy, hammering the floorboreds. A swirling, dry slithering like earthworms in the air. Kinetic energy passed like an invisible crowd-surfer. Eyes dart around the room hungrily, carelessly, abstractly, from energy sources to the map of faces to obscured images of lustfulness. Roping and mounting this current, a view from above the seething bed of flesh, smoke and solvents. Fourteen limbs pound and pull and stroke at unleashing the essence, a hand-hydra of striving simultanea. It pours out like a broken dam over the edge and crashes down into the ringed eyes, where it's met with warmth and coolty. Bodies gyrate as in a great invisible grasp, others observe the ritual from behind and out front of masks. Openness and closedness, penetration and deflection, acceptance and remoteness, dissolving into the stinging cloud as the djinn flee their bottles by the fistful. At the edges, around the corners out of sight, chilled eyes calculate a practiced ritual, tabulating tos and fros and the rising and lowering of masks and the rate of djinn-liberation. Unheard under the din, tiny abaci rattle, total, and spit out their verdict. Their ears like sieves, allowing the essence to flit through unconsidered. Hidden knives slit out and dissect the moment, neatly separating the components and in a blur exchanging one part for another, a chugging blue train for a shambling crazy-quilt. Outside the rumbling walls is cold gray and frozen amber, emptiness, lonely scatteredness scrabbling for warmth and oblivion. Bitterness and brazenness and brokenness hover and dissipate, draining off under the sweep of the great hand, silencing any protest, drowning and exhaling any honor, any trust, any hope.

Labels: Poems