Buildings have disappeared, and the sky
and ancient elms along the boulevards.
Everywhere, human peacocks fill the streets. 
This one, a dark blue shadow, holds a cigarette
between red lips. He feels the air change
and his hands go icy among the crowds.
Two women follow, one in cream and crimson,
the other in feathered hat and echoing blue.

A man pushes his cart through the throng
as colors swirl around green wheels.
But soon the rivers will be choked with corpses, 
crows will screech across the fields of France. 
Sun sets and  moon sticks to the flesh of night. 
In winter, howling trains will bring the artists home.

Buds from the same green stalk,
they grow towards different suns.

Such long necks stretching toward
hurtling photons, bending from

green roots buried too deep in 
indifferent earth. Brothers 

with your narrow shoulder blades, 
your mouths cracked open, your cheeks 

chiseled into green rock, have you 
witnessed your sister’s hands, those 

golden flowers brazening their strange 
way up to blossom wildly in alien air?

She has torn her face from the chalk-
pale moon, left a bloody scar on the dark 

ocean of frozen sky. Auburn hair spills
over her shoulder, almost hiding the bud

of her small breast. All night, her brother
speaks to the stars with a tongue of fur.

Skin burns as he performs his secret work.
Sometimes she watches, wishing for such

round eyes and teeth fashioned from glass.
He fills the frozen night with emptiness.

Her long arms protect, reflex made of 
tenderness and fear, but her smudged 

eyes, those smoldering smoke pots, 
incinerate the room. A new planet hangs

before her, pink as blood draining 
into fingers, pulsing at some strange 

frequency that shatters glass, or bends light 
into perfect circles melted into golden walls.