Devastated

White as the wisdom tooth of dawn,
This cloud and its bone sky
Forms like a skull above you.

There are rocks in the garden,
Dolmen and henges in the doorways
Of your pretty home
Where the true owners of the ground
Tear apart the floorboards and rise.

The narrow drive from home to office,
Now littered and tarred,
Is the stone road to forever.
But the sun’s hand is too pale,
Light itself is distorted,
Casts fewer shadows,
Makes the gravel blue.

You grow enormous
But your dimensions lie about your space.
You can still pass under bridges
While your head is in the clouds
And your heart in the trees’ canopy.

Best forgotten is the reason
For your daily toil,
For whose needless waste of effort
You go across the deserted highway,
Past the traffic lights' aimless flickering,
Down the intersections now grown with weeds,
Over stones in the street where the tar
Flows like water.

This river, an amazon as wide,
Coils in the city:
A snake in its heart,
Under the crude sun
In its cartoon heaven.
All the water in this desert has run
Like the rats and people
Into the roads
To be swept away like sticks
Into the roads to be;
To be carried to another home
On the tides of time.

But here, you, one of the dead,
Are master and master-less.
Flesh is a memory just as
Memory is flesh.
Dreams wake into other dreams
In the long tunnel
Under the river of the city
Cross-town traffic.
The noon light blinds you
Till the eyes arch in the skull
And vision is purple.

Only by a retail outlet,
Where the autotellers dwell,
Do you stop for currency.
But the screens are colourful
And offer happiness without money.
You find your credit unlimited
And your identity changed for ever.
In the mirror glass your face is bone
Like the sky, and your eyes
Form small mouths and say:
‘Sleep no more.’

Initialising