Signs and Voices

This place rides me, a foreign tourist in an unholy land, skittering from leaf to leaf like a bug on the water, pouring whiskey into the veins of the obsequious and malevolent, and drying up the earth below from the icy step of a cold march forward, hellbent on terror and destiny with the money to make both real

The flash of the sky in between branches tells me that this is closing, these will be the last days, and the fire of night will rise beyond the flat graves of the unknown, shrieking and clawing the sharp air along the way, covered in ashes like soft, fresh rose petals, a million miles an hour and a full revolution away from the sun, until it burns its name into the back of time, braiding language with infamy and demanding the crescent of the poor moon to its knees in supplication

This world will not end
This world will not begin
The land will fall and the beasts will stand long enough to see their legs shatter below them like ice warming on the outskirts of hell
The roads will split and splinter, orchids and mosses and azaleas exploding out of it and dotting the trail with reds and purples and white and greens, tidal and dark with color and fog
The cabins of our souls will become weightless in the drift, echoing off one another and stretching over pyramids and mountains and plains and shredded fields of shamrocks and rivers that grow into enormous earth-born clouds and sit, content and moving like a tiny Venus set on the shelf of Mercury
The cabins stroll and bark through time, a strong bank of flowers and silt married to nothing, rooted in cold objective opaque glass that forces you to look harder, to push further, and to trust in your eyes even as they become more and more suspect

The world begins where we do
The signs and voices around us dance in the ether, ready for interpretation, waiting to be utilized, praying that this line of sight will have enough clouds roll over it to seem real, but that it will be clear enough to inspire hallucinations
Terror is local
Love is wide
Fury is the root of art

And the heaven below us wants us to see it all in a big flaming ball of stars and light, sputtering and flourishing in the hazy evening of a thousand years, and sew it together like a giant blanket made of confetti from the gods