A Halo of Flies

A hundred generations of beetles

Live inside my chest

Tiny pincer mandibles shredding

My desiccated flesh

I

Twenty six nails line my box

I count them endlessly

My dry, dusty bones laying on

Their rusting sharp edges

I tried

A fungus grows on my foot

I stay perfectly still contemplating it

As its thin roots split open my bones

Pouring powder onto my floor

I tried, but

A maggot crawls into my ear

I feel it chewing and clawing

Soon it is joined by more of its kind

A homey little nest

I tried, but I

I spend ten generations of the insects

Trying to remember the scent of tulips

The taste of ice cream

The touch of lips to mine

I tried, but I can

I long to stretch my arms

To yawn without my jaw falling off

To break the cobwebs between my fingers

And to see, just to see

I tried, but I can not

The world has six tiny sides

And started to leak

The water trickles down my chest

Soaking into my floor

I tried, but I can not rest!

I can bare it no longer

The sound of rotten wood rending

Wet dirt pouring on my face

I am liberated!

The flies burst from my skull

Freed into the murky night

I am the first, but the others follow

Mounds of dirt exploding people

We walk from the grave yard

Our names long erased from our tombstones

We walk to the great bonfires

And to the dancers celebrating

A celebration, a joyous one

Our grandchildren and great-grand children

All the generations of our people celebrate

For tonight the zombi walks the Earth

Our Lady of Perpetual Discord

I. Chaos

Hail Eris, full of grace

Most treasured of deities

Who saw the world and wept

II. Discord

For the world broke

Under the fist of Adam’s children

Little tin men building little tin kingdoms

Creating governments, militaries,

Economies, religions, the law

Attaining and retaining power

Concentrating it in their hands

III. Confusion

There is no Goddess but the Goddess

And the universe is the prophet of the Goddess

Kallisti

IV. Bureaucracy

Yahweh drowned his creation

While a president was shot

While a city met a fiery death

While trains crossed an entire continent

Delivering millions to die

Yahweh, Lee Harvey Oswald,

Harry Truman and Adolph Hitler

Each, in turn, said,

“Now look at what you made me do”

All trying to deny

That God is a crazy woman

V. The Aftermath

Zeus and Hera and Athena

Fortuna and Justitia and the Moirae

The wise old gods left

The late great planet Earth

Tiring of the God game

Feeling there were better

Uses of their time, saying

“Now look what you made me do”

Who needed them anyway?

The world already had enough Gods

Mammon and Power and Realpolitik

Privilege and Purity and Hierarchy

What Can I Do and

The Same Thing We Did Yesterday and

Get Them Before They Get Us

And the ancient enemies of life

Order and Harmony and Organization

Eris wept