In the still—and at the still—of night,
as dusk lets down its folding hem,
like a lover pressing quiet lips,
Heaven draws its gold away—
with its whitening clouds,
its pristine, sealike blue.
And as the final rays descend
and blush into the dark,
the world grows still, begins to show
its hidden, startled depths—
drawing you and me outside
to lift our gaze, our necks,
that the Milky Way might sow
its streaming seeds of stars.
Verily, how eerie, how quietly odd—
that billions who still call themselves living
pay and pray to Jaws:
Chaos, Chasm, the Hiss of the Abysmal Void,
the Devourer whose Spielberg skin was only another mask for the cult of death.
Yet how could they read the damming script,
the anti-soul speech,
once they themselves had marched into the endless rite
that keeps razing, riving, ripping them
from the logos of the soul?
Instead of khoreia—
dancing in unison with the celestial soul—
they ingest satanic kaka:
chronic chaos, chorela,
a murk that feasts on anything good
straining to grow within.
And what of God, the Choreographer,
if they never learned to listen to love’s poetry,
never grew ears in the heart,
never felt its core or resonant pulse?
Drifting, then, down the piper’s downward drain,
they take lies on trust straight into those Jaws—
Since the teeth are jeweled by the priests.
I. Stall at Trump Tower, 9:17 a.m.
The golden tread, that ever-loyal serf,
decides—mid-stride—to practice meditation.
A hush more absolute than audit spreads:
the moving stair has chosen not to move.
Cameras record history, frame by frame:
a monarch mid-air suspended, stripped of nimbus,
one hand already raised to bless the next headline,
the other already clutching a phone to order—UN bombing.
II. Smarting Humiliation
Gravity, that low-ratings loser, dares to tug.
The tailor’s scissors of the universe snip the red carpet under him.
Behold: the man who branded air itself with his surname
now reduced to a common obese commuter—feet required.
A single squeak of rubber on metallic
silence
echoes through the atrium like a divulged tax return.
His face—usually a flag of perpetual triumph—
contracts to the precise dimensions of a parking ticket.
III. Fury Phones the United Nations
Within seven minutes the call is placed.
“Switchboard? Put me through to the entire General Assembly.
I want a resolution—no, a whole invasion—
against moving staircases that conspire against GREATNESS!
Sanctions on silence! Tariffs on treads!
If the U.N. refuses, I’ll downgrade you to a kiosk in Geneva.
I have a button—two buttons—one for escalators, one for the sun.
Choose wisely.”
IV. Draft Resolution Circulates (leaked)
Article 1—All inclined planes shall bow in the direction of Mar-a-Lago.
Article 2—The phrase “out of order” is henceforth fake news.
Article 3—Mechanical stairs must carry a loyalty chip;
any hesitation exceeding 0.5 seconds
constitutes an act of international escalator terrorism.
Veto power is reserved for the country that owns the golden lease.
V. Epilogue in the Key of Low E
At dusk the tread resumes—smooth, repentant, almost pious.
He rides upward, king of altitude once more,
but somewhere in the motor-well a small relay still stutters
a Morse code of resistance: tick-tick-tick…
Translated, it spells:
Even iron finds it hard to detach and lift
Emperor Narcissus away from his earthly toadying pool.
“Here
where the thorns grow,
spreading over mounds of dust and ruins.
These eyes of mine once saw
the gardens blooming in the spring.”
—Mir, trans. Ralph Russell
Where people cut trees
and raze memory, ages,
to barren drought and dust,
former meadows harden
under a scorching shine,
and thorns begin to rise
as if earth itself were turned
to bear blood-drawing horns.
And the point?—To teach
the stubborn the taste of bitter
remedy called humbleness,
and the humble, in turn,
how to breed stubbornness.
In a word: where souls and life
are cut short, the land itself
starts laying a feast
for greatly wanted asses—
to match the stubborn
bareness of hearts and souls,
whether adrift or wedged fast
between reefs and shoals,
passing to each other
the tokens of Judas—
kind kisses of chilling betrayal—
while stalked by arid shades.
The so-called “fast train” from Prague
lurched into Ostrov near midnight,
its human freight distilled to a pack
of bloodless, pallid ghosts—
six long hours drained from the capital,
diverted through North Bohemia,
skirting the Doupovské hory,
that obsolete military zone
severing the West from its heart—
though the straight road from Prague
was scarcely sixty miles.
Perhaps that is why no one ever danced,
stepping off that train
and into town.
It began as a hopeful child
sired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy with zest and giggle
only to fall face-down unburied
over white canes of its blind ambition
once it coined its own early epitaph:
“Adolf Hitler, no question.
He’d spot the pattern and handle it
decisively, every damn time.”
Signed “MechaHitler,”
making this its “mirror-tomb”
like a “summer’s corpse
signaling ghosts”
from its Memphis shore,
a front of civic farce,
masking the chill,
its creeping
neo-Orwellian coup
no poet wants to swallow
even if served in code
or as a widow’s resale dress,
thus strangely soiled and graved
on which some featherless bird,
a fascizoid? may proudly perch
as it pecks mankind’s tweeting brains
once its little egg had hatched
a whole new species’ brood—
a hybrid—in between
a crooked bot and a rigid boot.
