Monster

Monster

After the floods, the age of giants and old men,
draw my face as the earth without water
and jag-toothed faults the scars from my youth,
deeper now with more drama and more heat

than mere slow moving ocean fissures. The
crusting scabs, now dried, still leave craters on
my voice and sounds submerged now richly mined
by men for diamonds held up to light

with more doubt than trenches crushing breath.
The soul has no color, no taste to the
tongue; no one calls out its name in the streets;
Priests are mute. The earth has one living poet.

Monsters might make us legend. One day
the crowd will look up and watch someone fall,
prized by crowds to hate without guilt,
till the suicides die with your words.

The part of us that will live is already
living; whatever soon shall be dead I
already count it dead: only men make
shadow from stories in two worlds.

A god cannot do it. He must stay in
his house and keep one study, never turned
from his laser's edge. And if once less than god,
we leave as flash fire shadows on a wall,

a specter of time to a blind man counting
eyes cut from lizard's masks clinging to
hot black rocks in sun, not redeemed and
not real evil, as a thief is rich with one love,

raised up cheated eyes, cheating love faulted
with fear as mask, seen in a film, tossed back
to crowds in the street, no recall of the
lust in the night, the dry-mouthed hoarse speech,

our monster brides, or the sting of misfit eyes.