We met as phantoms in the mountains,

Unable to avoid the transnational arm of sleep

Of whatever city we got raised in.
I had such a beautiful dreamtime, an electric field,

My only weapon against it was to escape

Like Fantômas to the mountains where I met
Failed companies still operating under rotations of

Wild & loaded faces. A party danced nightly

In whatever settlement arose next.
Driving hard down the rue we strafed & founded

The ghost of Baghdad, a bag-heavy breeze

Of phantoms to maintain, & that we mooned,
Howling up a storm so that landslide myths would soon

Descend on the Coalition of opulence.

But that city’d been razed already
By the ELK, the Electric Light Korporation

Illuminating bones with a muzak unknown to me:

A silent fountain able to maintain
Despite the holey cluster the church had become—

Towering opinions having bleakly caved in.

Now everyone wants to sit in the rose
Of Venus: hermits are smitten by her ravines, suburban

Drunkards burn like moths in her brambled gin;

Needy men gyrate then faint on end
But no waterfall can compete on Stag’s night as dear old

Diana swallows the mature-aged sex industry

In whatever gun city she gets a raise next.
It’s a slippery slope, a Humming Flower production,

A piquant high of opals, as though the sea level’s

Risen to a newfound mountain peak.
Sometimes the ocean darkens, full of deadly schrapnel,

Orphic oysters berthing with news of forever

On our razored city shoreline—
It’s a furphy the Centaurs defecate on

From the height of the Collapse & into the Gulf,

Another mountain to climb for the Falling Man.
Roland keyboards on “beast mode” amplify the shock,

Sounding like teeth-plaque, like a bum-rush out or in

To whatever position will arouse me nix:
Fire drills ring out!—but I keep sleeping through it: I’m a wake

On an invisible pulley above a valley of tears, hanging out

With Fantômas of the mountainous Allegories
& we’re watching the latest TV wheeling & dealing

Over Libya from a romantic holiday chalet,

Our waterless eyes like onyx as
Craters explode & palm trees curdle over the edge of

This railing, designed for & streamed to those who dream

To meet like phantoms in the mountains

Of whatever city they got raised in.


Note: this poem is an inversion of Villes II by Rimbaud