Marauders.

Fire-drawn, chaos-embalmed, welt-delivering;

Dique, o whispers petrified;

Avarice-kind, high-strung, maligned;

Night specters tripping on petrichor and

Bloodlust, 

Donning chainmail and shaking out the rust.

“The planets are aligned,” the old crone chimes.

“Come time to make martyrs out of archaic mums:

Nuns, desert-blistered beatniks, crackheads and 

Krakens, from 

Here to kingdom

Come.”

On and on!

Patter on the asphalt,

Dark matter slung by darker minds,

Screeching–pitch horrified–whilst hideous

Faces morph–elastic–fall flat, melt and contort,

Purging the mask of the civil and benign.

Plunging down,

Headless, throbs the gobbling mob; it is

Like if Icabod injected adrenaline, was

Crazed from the Dengue, was

Charged with hatred, vengeance, was

Given one night by the devil to make mischief,

Marauder, murder, spin crosses like windswept webs.

This is a peopled storm goring steeples, fingering gutters ‘til 

Eaves are torn,

Desecrating graves, chaining namesakes to hungry

Snakes, 

Capsizing lightbeams spilt by blighted stars,

Our frightened moon.

“We feel so alive!

Blimey, how divine!”

Interesting, is it not?

How humdrum towns, television-bred sons and daughters,

Accountants, attorneys, louses and others, readied, put on the pounds

As soon as the sun unmounts, crawls down.

How they file out of homes just as her warm, surveilling, lean lens 

Winks, hounds the horizon,

Welds swirling, purpling, twilighting celestial ceilings

To bristling, silhouetted forests and yellow windows lit by
Low fires which echo the howls wrenched from pastures, prairies, glens,

The dens of hares.

This fairytale fare leaks, eeks out, leeches

Into the bones of mankind:

Whether Grimm’s, or Aesop’s, or old grand’s,

Father Time’s, the Wives’, 

Darwin’s,

The heresiarch’s or the sanctified priest’s,

The Archdioceses’,

The many which rhyme.

We are only mortals who loose morals when we must play fair

With others. 

Otherwise–

Marauders–

Us lot: heathens, turned deacons, curmudgeons,

Liars, confessors, smoke-breathers, fakers,

Poisoned bread makers,

Movers who hoover up shakers,

Fearmongers, warriors, hegemon lovers

And combat games spectators. 

By and by, goodness be–

Somehow, despite the longest odds,

Most all have learned The Lesson:

To destroy: easy and untenable–

To create: art–

Art, the covenant, our savior, channels the marauding 

Spirit with scientific exactitude, rectifying in

All us weirdos

All our universally unsaid perversity,

Always.

(Awe, hail.)