Severed Claw

I
Crystallized sensitivities with as many faces as the average sycophant
plugging their latest escapades
across the airwaves in broadcasts
with all the flair of a military tribunal--

Alien hieroglyphics on the walls of windowless cells lined with scalp & dead talent,
ever the straight man to the imagination’s psychotic jester,
jury selected by blood lottery for the psyche’s withered court,
all jaded beyond any naked impulse--earthquake realization in fiercest clover desecrated far past the point of
natural delusion, the ego’s still-raw exit
wound gutted as much by butcher knife as by its own inevitable
relapse into guilt-ridden mania--

II
Dowsing for underground scars where gold & amber once lay as though never to rise--paranoia’s latest and least colorful tattoo transposed to a key as minor as the one who mutates into what is irreplaceable
with so precise a mutilated abandon--precision belonging to the perennial Outsider & his ever-merry counsel of enlightened halfwits--all
tormenting rightfully the fully fledged & fleshed-out
fugitives they were fated to become;
reason’s foul advance daubed in bloody cuneiform, making torturous haste to ultimate doom;
clotting terror’s arteries hard as any aluminum cupcake--Iron hurricane softly
tread the doorway of the unspoken, humanity prone to self-parody
as television sitcom,
viewed only by a zeitgeist whose lone yearning is for collective self-sabotage--
Whose feats of imaginative derangement
leave an acrid taste on any tongue of hellfire

III
Godless automatons vomit up furnaces, foreheads & cheese-grating accidents, the gnomish banter subliminally mistaken for the latest child prophet’s inaugural rampage--
Demystifying the whole archaic cast of churning pretenders,
Steaming the steel throne in mist & incense,
trading Oriental perfumes for teardrops
Squeezed from sow’s eyes yellow as sunflowers, gaping
abjectly at a life laid bare as a severed claw…