The Downward Stroke

The white-capped mushrooms grew in open sunlight They grew in thickest grass near a misshapen tree Forcing their way through detritus of former greenery Their arrogant tenure painting man a fool For treating expectation as unspoken rule The rising castle walls Under a gray and rainless sky Besieged by city streets There is no shelter in these halls The gates are made of glass And past the gates a metal plaque A broken memory of that which came to pass As if a shadow cast in daytime Can keep the coming night from turning black A powder coarse Of sugar, sulfur, nitrocellulose Was meant to detonate Yet it did not of course There is no hiding from the crowds Beneath these faceless autumn clouds The winds of autumn expectations blow them to and fro The packs upon their shoulders hunch each aging prisoner Keeping their faces turned to childish things Only their haggard hair and musky summer smells betray Adulthood barely kept at bay Metallic birds of paradise Eviscerate Prometheus Probing his liver and his intestines With beaks that twist and rend Then like a phoenix do they cauterize And in a dance recalling its integrity Prometheus' body do they mend Guiding his flesh to heal the wound Until Prometheus is whole again Yet, do they leave him shackled still A sacrifice to keep alight the fires of men Defiant of the setting sun Dying fluorescent lights adorn The gas stop on the hill Across the broken overpass It barely beckons still To travelling throngs long gone At night I saw the highway's banking turn Still rising from the dirt and dust An oxbow lake of asphalt With one last stand of equidistant metal poles Reflecting moonlight The solitary ghostly headlight Of vehicles long turned to rust A devil turns the wheel of fortune Its turning breaks all things All creeds and lands and kings As fresh-faced aspirants With fresh-spilled blood upon their hands Hold on to rise to their own zenith Then fall in turn as if a shooting star To face their own blind reckonings