SPIDER WARS DIPTYCH

spider wars


You will not come to find things. You will come to scatter, to release crowns from a hollow royalty. Ambition falls into the bins provided. And you will leave by the back gate, off to find your place in the newest war.

Working through the recipe, you develop criminal habits: think through the various arguments, resist the fall into the cup. Austerity is your only law.

On the hilltops, rockets become a gleaming test of election principles. Examinations behind the orange sky. And the tyrant arrives in the guise of protector. An imperial weight.

But you arrive at Human Meat City and there is a hanging wolf at the gates, a message that all feet will fail. Curtained machines. Recycled blood of the wasted. Drink from the floating communal heart.

*

Shining legs tie the poisoned into knots and send them home to their families as a symbol and memento. To reanimate the war dead, the campaigners suck marrow clean and spin webs back into hollow bones. They are lighter and more porous, though rearranged and stupefied. They are open to suggestion.

The imperial widowmaker, the doomsday machine, sits up on his back four. He guides their migration by magnets in their heads. Buildings here are not. They are slight projections, encoded enclosures, and vanish at the merest sign.

Destructors sink their tails and pour out malice. A custard forms on the forest floor. Frantic mesh of hands, impersonal hacking, dark mulch of soil, rotten cells heaped onto one another. Every way out is the way back in.

*

Miniature fauna chew off their legs to escape. A wasted man in a hospital tent recites the hours. Geese sprinkle themselves across the greenest lawns.

Whatever is given away comes together. In a flock at the far edge of sight. Any way will be the way out. Figures gather and the city is sewn together by its inhabitants’ hands.

An oak spreads its branches for the hundreds gathered here. From a lemon sky, abstract ideas rain. Animals lift their noses as little as possible.