Prayer from the Terrapolis

{Terrapolis; tεrəpəlIs, n. A city that covers the Earth.}

come with me my son
and I’ll tell you something I heard believe
that is the world is round, rolls
toils and round that its city lets roil
and seethe and breathe and blow
the boil of a thousand
timepieces running useless

I, dressed in rags, a plain old fart,
say “let the world know itself through art”
will you like me a drunk in the sunken quarter
lie shat in the old town, a concrete tomb and
dream a nightmare under spy satellite?
a nightmare blowing cold and warm
fused to a candle burning in the night air,
fondly forgetting the never –
lying breathing the never never fever

I dream that up to me through the dark
street walks a man like myself - “yes Sam.
Listen twice.” he says his is the eye
that never sleeps as still-backed
water reflects a moon amid oil rainbows
+ star ship skeletons that star that in fever
I dream and cry “favour me master
. hand my hold & inform me”
blissed by pills I have an after-life taster and see
God Eyed Theo the Styx river burning rafter

swaddled you waddle to Memphis
missioned to evolute or pollute a prise
from the mouths of black holes
we are parts in all life’s common strain
all sprung from common media
we are the spores exhaled across a dish by time
Invented, just as when you are hearing this
in some other life and I am just a fiction -
and the spark in my eye is as dead as nova

[plant me
there
one foot deep
- unsoul me]

our rivers stopped running last year
whilst they rinse space with their wings
& construct citadel piano lands radio shacks
and far away Salome’s yet here
under Gibralter I rear you
my hands planted on the wheel of your life
I fear for you. Ruining string, we bail air
while they lifeboats return for the preciousthing
return to drink and mate like flies on a pond
with a belch coloured bilge whelp – burp!
heaving out to the sky from the city gullet

I will you will not live in a polis
that bleeds ruddy car cases into the rivers
and rots frond-like designs touching the stratus,
fit to amaze in blessed metal and noise
and nuclear light, the thrum thrum
of reactors tiding you to a sleep
filled with implanted wrongs.
Can i not place a ganga stone lingam in the hand
of the tiny baby on my knee?

Flogging the greasy air
barely awake - to him
I am a remote abstraction of
care outside his understanding.

gather him in coils of hope
I tread the mortal stair
and carry my boy into time
though know nothing of what lurketh there

☼
Supposing there is no end or
beginning
the universe not expanding
from some big bang
but brought into largeness through perspective

and so light also relatively
ageless and
always fresh
as when first flicked

‘first’ is the bastard

An old man running dough through the spaghetti machine; a universe branching and unbranching; both are wrung like an idea from foam.