Pale Stone

Pristine ivory and sterile sapphire, and the vibrant clever crimson life-blood, flowing from North to South like an immense and polluted river. Lawlessness becomes lawfulness, when rulers are rampant and the people are pigeonholed. Stripes like the torn backs of slaves, stars brightly reflected in the sea of innocent blood, stretching from East to West like a soiled and stained canvas.

Pale stone and yellow papers held close to your bosom, and our walls are tall, so very damn tall. Some try to climb, but always they fall back again, and return to rot in the dust. And we're proud of ourselves and ridiculous standards of goodness, oh yes, the Few, the Proud. Reciting prayers to a dead God and saluting a burnt flag, oh yes, rise up slothful empire, rise up obscure kingdom, rise up and sleep no more. So those Few, those Proud proclaim as they giggle and seize and foam at the mouth.

If my legs were less muscle and more bone, would you love me? How about if my hair was longer? When did intimacy become neon lights and scared little girls in high heels? I saw my shadow touching himself in public, and no one told it to stop. We measure justice in skin, and truth by the denomination: but everyone knows who is really casting the shadow. Seven percent of my time goes to a crazy little man in a funny hat. A little sympathy here, a little vitriol there, and the whole damn thing keeps spinning in great lethargic circles stepping on the unborn and crushing the dreams of girls and old men alike.

Held high in the sky is the bloody tattered thing that so many flock to in time of need or greed. Fires burn in the hearts of a people grafted like skin in the bosom of a foreign land, haughty, self-righteous, salt of the earth liars and tricksters. Buried deep in the earth are the broken beautiful fleshy things that so many flock to in times of life and death. Smokes wafts from piles of shit and skin burning long into the night, like incense to an insane god no one really believes in. Prayers and veiled threats are the local dialect of Sodom, and the lingua franca of social serial killers and men in windowless vans.

Someone told us to be afraid, so we cower every summer and light the sky up as we watch the thunderclouds gather as we spit watermelon seeds on the blood stained dirt. Hold your hands high, this could our last day together, the Lord comes riding on those thunderclouds shouting propaganda and statistics, a preacher's wet-dream.

Pale stone, like black market ivory carved into teaspoons and cufflinks, and yellow paper stained with non-linear morphological verb conjugation, or is that Salem, the witch-hunts and all? I can never tell the desert and the burning stake apart.