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Mediocre raiders lie in wait. Teeth clack in sleep, dreams fraught with ambush. Orders intercepted, encrypted to the house style. The litterateur tracked back through his ISBN to no man's land - the robotic verb activated, sent in under barbed metaphor strung out where trees once stood as camouflage. The voices from his hill-bunker a wind turbine. Accusations tumbled in the night. For months he heard soft hammering, mimicry; they failed. Could not beat back the weather on his chosen ground.

*

Time passes - that pressure in space again - return of the unoriginals tinkering with the power-box - such fine work - setting traps out for darkness. Time passes - talons curve and hook - how the mouth chokes with ash. Feet drag muffled under dungeons. Time passes - that pressure in space again - a new proclamation from Semiotic City - this custom built dome and aquarium light, pulsing: henceforth, no corners to hide around - no zone permitted for surprise to leap.

*

Hugely, our indifference squats - unleavened as fear, blood is contained within news footage. Archaeologists stop digging deserts because of landmines. Camels wait for sand dunes to drift into ridges - blue flags flutter back at Fort Apache on brave white trucks (what gets through is the scent of coffee). A footless boy hobbles past, bargain hunting, a life at odds & ends - smoke drifts over Manhattan, out across the Hudson river as from a Bedouin campfire.

*

Circuit; right hand wise, homage to the sun - as did ancient Celts, Scythians, too - host to the Milesians on their last leg to Ireland as the first Celts castaway - whose home precinct the Black Sea, the right hand to the centre; memoried in standing stone circles. Yet homage to a sun as walking pillar of fire, with hell for a coronet? The world's breath and mystery end here, earth's innards engorged - sprawled redly coast to coast.

*

If streets had cobblestones blood would flow in tatters - torn flags to a revolution lost. Streets smoothly ease to drains. The cut deep, and blood wakes from its blackness, crushed as berries in the runnels of a wagon, oozes its oil from the body's casket - til flesh becomes porcelain, perfect surface for moon, ice, the glass-edged sky to play upon; in silences deep as birch in the bayoneting dark - and leaves finally resemble paper money piled up under the turbined lamplight.

*

A Public Works draughtsman spent thirty years designing the City Sewerage Reticulation System he eventually hoped to escape through - a masterpiece! A prairie dog would have been proud of it. Complex of accented runs, angles, drops, sluices, pumps, ditches, endless unbowed archways, treatment ponds breaking into sunlight - the architects of Athens would have been proud of it. Only on paper - not one trowel lifted! miles and miles and miles of it.

*

Pyrrha, your dewy hair, yellow, scented, doubly wreathed in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis this morning - your new lover yet to arrive, breathless. Your tantrums are as sea-storms, heart-wrecking for that unsuspecting voyager - maybe as survivor, I might warn him against your squally lust, he won't find safe haven in your arms! This note is record enough - that I set down against your lubricous hold.

See: Horace's 'Pyrrha' ode. I,v.

*

The flames above the wall, private show for the Gods, the city burned three days, at night, smoke warmed the stars. Border forest shifted with shields - scritch-owl, a horse's impatient breath - the hawk wheeled under a pennant moon. In the grey dawn men turned North. The druid notched these events onto trunks that lead to deeper wood - envisioned - silence, incantation; the God found within the stone.

*

Once cradle of civilization - now crucible, a sandstorm of tanks, a battery of rocket-launchers each one bright as a guiding star slams home to its birth place, sand sprites leap dervishly, limbs gad about, horses buckle back upon themselves - empty out like exhausted bellows. A beggar (in nameless rags) calls out in either prayer or curse to the desert night first refuge for saints; Cross and Crescent belch fire.

*

Forty thousand tons. Space dust, diamond and sapphire, snips of light, collect on earth yearly. Dust breaks bread on our too dusty planet; on our twice dusty planet; on our overly dusty planet made available to wind; dust breaks down glaciers. Broken deserts from sand storms deliver dinosaur dust, highways loosen tyre dust, your home a time capsule - our earth bent dustward forsworn to decay.

*

A giallo antico moon framed within cratered ruins. Country turned up at the edges like a dirty postcard. Poplars, broken spars of pine, cypress. Dusty plane trees rubbed raw by abrading tanks in the market square. Two ambulances shoved aside. Kabul. The Republic of Georgia's snowy mountains [backdrop to some desolate soccer field]. A few lean men shouldering grenade launchers pass by and grin, heading for the glacire.

*

'The Breaking of Nations' a horse cough, as history laments its own passing. What ghosts urge these riots? Memory is dead, flags and banners dissolve back into thoroughfares. The East is reliquary; bone splinter and shrapnel mixed in daily. What ghosts urge these riots? Barbarism looms in the triumph of immediacy, a final exit from the Garden of Eden, bombs bristling moments ago at cockcrow.

*

'A line is taking a full-stop for a walk,' said Klee. A straight line is the supreme act of cruelty; is intent without reprieve, ambush and final judgement; Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, (bullet-to-victim); the scroll of credits, a squadron of lines; the banding of speech, a geology of sound; the blade tilt of horizon that bloodies a sun; is gravity compressed and a disk flung wide, is flatness departing life to nothing - spear cast on a plain at sunset.

*

Buildings off the crustal shelf, drop shouldered - lean to, against the sky in crazy surrealist back drop, expressionist haze is shock amongst rubble and safety helmets spotted lamp-lit - an engine harvests an infant, luckily, dead pale but pained; dust cakes sudden caves by a broken 10th floor grounded, bedraggled beneath re-inforcing caged. Tectonic plates lock brake drums an instant on the Richter scale. Taiwan slips on the tooth of a cog.

*

Generalization of Old World caught in the plane's sweep. Look up! sound makes memory after. Dragging loss is violence; O ye who suffer banishment, nourishment grounded. Dearth 'tis. Rabble is ordinary, a thing apart, the jackal at play, toying with world's diamonds, spittle aglitter. Laughter strewn, down-compressed to mud. From whence the swing and arc, blood's roar rose, gave judder to the first step - before the word, the wind in the word; rabble speech was. In the beginning.

*