'and a cross, never rose before me' by Tasha Klein

Devoid of the Lord I crawl along in my survivalist suit & I smell terrible things -- pale dead fish the soup kitchen's only truth -- steel upon steel another day here recreant thin as the ocean's last spray -- Welcome To The Perpetual Kind living under the Fulton Bridge or in an abandoned Pay-by-Day I never got sister's re- union invites or the news about how Uncle Welter's flatfish prostrate flatfished. No I was in the between not the moving along and up only pre tending to swing on God's slippery silvery branches my marooned breath drawn as I reached that felt gate -- the Everyone-Eye pointing to the barren earth: the remembered neighborhood where cars once filled with noisy youth 'Your weight is mine' that ancient snare still scrawled across the old water tower & somewhere deep in the posioned foliage She - the ancient one eats fake chorizo & levitates near her clustered mad the new gorey the spiritless grim relics in broken chant turning greyer into something even greyer and a sun lights me up and I become as calm, as I am tall and the eleven, slyly, becomes the seven hymns like coral curling around the dark solace of a dead tree's trunk hollow as the stray pond yonder a bone for your arid garden of rouged mid-day angels their cracked wings no longer supple enough to unfurl nightly the minds that glow hot a chemical reaction to this distorted pinball of twilight spiraling down from the temple in the sky not that one that Mary built there in the middle of all God's dead logs and stumps and before that a sea had been kind once with its endless offerings there was peace in the water beneath the re painted stars and in each footstep a gladness as we gently spooled through groves of petals eddies of roots still growing all the way to the Center our necks chaff in starched collars the hustlers the local tossers fallen wizards the dealers & the wheelers a new parade to stand before the altar altered by the sheer weight of earth's newest Sky Prophet, his childlike expression as fresh as his red-tinged whiskers he promised to cut sin and sorrow right out of our hearts through some rediculously over-glorified revival speaker who drew with great fervor a seven of swords as the official start of another year the Sky Prophet remained seated like a holy scarab on a greasy spoon until finally the band started with Bound Subs in the Jungle formerly Welcome to the Jungle only the green jungle would soon be gone up in smoke-clouds that tumbled morbid colors across that lush treeline animals cornered by the spreading fires leaving behind a poisonous residue that continuously snakes to what remains of the forgotten concrete jungles we call home