Dark Thought

It snuffed out the light on the Old Testament
It made the New Testament seem rather old
With its many prickly bushes with dangerous red berries
Its hypostyle halls covered in chalk drawings
Its still wind chimes and lifeless sock puppets

All vision was made holy and all vision
Was made dark and veiled like a privacy window
Lonely as a fax traveling the transatlantic line
Distressed as the permanent marker of a CIA censor
The black eyes of a doll getting saved from a house fire

With us since our days of rattles and pacifiers
Recurring like graffiti on some endless freight train
The world’s hammock given a spin by a brat with a flat top
Redirected to a parked page at the end of a string of queries
That offers medication for something intangible

I made my matter conjure up a particular horror
The flash of a blade in a moonlit back alley
The owls in the finger-like trees the only ones
Asking questions asking the only questions
One can ask of nothing but the empty street