Empty mazes of no reward
form within the fallen structures
of waste vast and primordial,
luring with siren sounds
each particle of matter and energy
into the wild dance of a universe
forever dying.

Erosion’s intimate touch
carve canyons of quiet shadows
standing in steady winds
delivering shape and line
to a crumbling cloud of mass
spinning through a swirling drain
of destruction.

Every rain drop
another victory,
another victory of disorder;
bringing stone to soil,
soil to silt,
raising ocean levels
with untouchable energy.

The flower of decay
rises unfolded from the rotting earth,
insulated by fortunate distance
from its vital nuclear furnace.

The multiplication of time
occurs with perfect illusion
spun of a struggle from equilibrium,
from death's sure gravity,
from the crushing grasp
of vision's hungry need.

And the products of probabilities
create one and the many
with a force long ago exhausted
by laws now obsolete;
forgotten and remembered
like the words of an actor
in an authorless drama.

A child reaching for bright colors,
within a sphere of delicate innocence,
burst the bubble of birth's light.
Sprayed with identity’s sweet pain,
damp with the beginnings of science,
open, new eyes scan
the effects of its curiosity.

Hunters gather prey
in a virgin Eden willing
to sustain the growing fires
of a want becoming savage
and the heat of a need consuming
the stores of an abundance violated
by evolution's narrowing momentum.

Spending the generous inheritance
rare man dances with the night:
warmed by situations of proportion
free migration speeds
before the wake of prowling deserts
filling the careless foot prints
with sands of defeated earth.

The avalanche starts slowly
with the blissful inertia of success,
the numbers sluggish with disease
and the slope of Earth's meager advantage.

Yet cries from the womb
joined by more cries from the womb
cascade into a confused riot,
harvesting a hundred smoking forests,
erecting a thousand crowded cities.

And devastation’s weight,
forgotten on tenuous ledges
within empty unknowns,
supporting off-spring of lost ancestors
upon hollow beams of fading history,
employing all who find themselves
standing in the task
of eternal repair.

Speeding before endless invention
the machine of chaos blazes the path
that mankind follows with clever exhaustion
to collect the rubble from their own creation
to build the concepts of infinite survival
and the hopes of an unbounded space.

The last hermit smiles at a new star
sparks the tea fire with a snap,
leans against geologic circumstance
and laughing with wizards gone,
pours the percolation of purity
into crucibles well worn with origins,
incubating the core of awareness
within the shell of death
forever dissolving into the surface
of the living now.