I.

Caterpillar larvae burrow deep into their tent-like nests within the scarred skeletons of trees. Their antler limbs, as if hacked off by machete, crash upon parked cars. Scattered by sudden squall, the exiled exhaust of frenzied humans metamorphoses into muck fit for the fertilization of roaches beneath the nervous intensity of street lamps powered by the splitting of uranium atoms gone critical.

From the stratosphere, we peer down upon the cities flaming with the mephitic implosions of train derailments. As if celebrating Mardi Gras, we parade in the heavens in inflated plastic garbage bags like those fondled each night by the incisors of raccoons and bound tight by the elastic straps of addicts.

The Leviathan spumes chlorine gas from its anteater’s snout; ever so mellifluently, the poison infiltrates through human arteries while whole cities are evacuated from the complacency of snores and nightmares in a crisis the likes of which the drowned priesthood of Atlantis could never have envisioned.

Already fractured by the relentless incisions of razor wielding street gangs, the lopsided planet winds itself through a murky void of boiling oil and metallic filings where mucous spit upon the sidewalks fries in electric woks before suddenly congealing into perfumed popsicles due to unexpected frost.

For each red and black rotation of the solar roulette of fortune, we wet our pants. With great striving, tarred and feathered, we attempt to scour clean our prickly spirits so that we, untarnished, may catapult in imaginary space vessels to the beatific realm of Martian poppies in the hope to escape asteroids, but nonetheless are left solitary to scavenge for what remains of the manna of twilight.

Knowing all flights of fancy are heartily condoned by our philanthropic patrons, we still seek a reward for braving the repetitive push-button ringing of cash registers―yet without access to the cash…

II.

Floating upon this these stormy asteroids, we have witnessed how Sputnik’s mollusc spines titillated the martial spirits of ham radio operators, sending virus-loaded virilia into distant climes of the stratosphere.

And we have also witnessed the horrors of how human lungs can be drowned in such fear like those three hours when the Leviathan’s tracking screens went haywire deep in the belly of Cheyenne Mountain and fantasized renegade Behemoth missiles on the warpath.

As Scriveners pore through military manuals to study how the mirrors of Archimedes once set aflame the fleet of Marcellus, old Catullus squeals: “Hear ye—hear ye―ye true believers in global dominion—Rome had already proved for all eternity that there is no possible defence against the penetration of a mosquito’s stiff proboscis!”

III.

Impossible to measure on the Richter scale, this ongoing earthquake has incited those prematurely prophesied Four Riders of an apocryphal Apocalypse to saddle their white, red, black, pale horses in a hangman’s posse of conquest/ revolution, revenge, speculation…

If still not believers, then regard the Congress of Vultures and their Timocratic sidekicks that hover above us in a cohesive pack upon spy satellites. Their sharpened talons clutch the multiple warheads of barbed missiles while waiting the moment to mobilize the call of the wild with their shrieks. Focus the zoom lens even more sharply to observe the clenched fists in opposition that salute the Plutonium Pushers with the aerial bombardment of saliva and rotten eggs…

Ye Olde Truth Book responds nada nada nada nada nada at the very moment when a twelfth century Ayatollah declares Holy War against all satanic whores and pimps, both big and little. The conflict seemingly perpetual, the captors of Gulliver’s children, after having once pretended to dump overpriced refined wines into the D.C. gutter, are now swarming on speedboats and dropping Styrofoam floats directly below the Leviathan’s Dreadnought battleships and where parasitic cowbirds lay ever inflating multitrillion green and black gold turds on the odds of the already disastrous outcome.

If still not convinced, then interpret and re-interpret the words of Nostradamus as so desired:

“Rain, famine, war in Persia having not ceased,

Too great a faith shall betray the Monarch.

The end planned and conceived in France,

A secret sign for one to be more sparing.”

It was naturally Nostradamus who foresaw how holy messages could be encrypted through Internet steganography. In other words, the messianic holocaust stewed from black and green gold (the putrid wine distilled in the ovaries of the earth and sipped in porcelain cups) was obviously prefabricated. The semen of planned obsolescence had already been impregnated into the very architectonic design of the cosmic assembly line.

“But who is secretly supposed to be ‘more sparing’?

Let us thus not err, at least too wasted, into the bottomless pit that awaits us! Are we to believe?

To determine whether this will be yet another Jonathan Edwards gospel sales pitch, a public promotion for a new book, a real classified dossier leaked from government archives, or else a premonition of a verifiable TRUTH will be, in itself, a millennial task…

IV.

In the distance, on the forgotten half of the planet, we spy in televised re-runs the golden hooves of Shisha-smoking Saracens and rebellious buzkashi players who had once brought Perfidious Redcoats to their knees…

Once its own home cooked barbeque escapades in rice paddies had fizzled out, the Leviathan tricks the Behemoth and its Muscovy Knights into invading Afghan steps with elephant helicopter gun ships that burst into flames when stung by incendiary missiles loaded with warheads packed with human fèces…

In vain, Timocrats claim they cannot comprehend the terror of stonings―in pretended outrage against Buddhas of Bamiyan dynamited in idolatrous envy in a pretext of protest against development assistance for statues—and not for the needy and themselves…

As all wrestle with bodies greased with poppy oil, the Leviathan, not too much unlike the Behemoth before it, will also find itself wedged between the rocks of Afghan steppes despite its clever manipulations―before it is then sucked deep into Mesopotamian quicksand … but only after the Sphinx and the Mahdi learn to fly…

As is so often said, what goes around, also comes around…

Regard Sura #18 “The Cave” for confirmation: “On that day, when Gog and Magog are spoiling the land, we shall let some of them surge against others and the Trumpet will be blown.”

V.

Storm clouds continue to rage in pure fury in concealing killer nano-satellites that gyrate within our presence promoted by Von Braun rocketeers with solar powered batteries to appease those who are still enamoured with the chimes of natural harmony. Naturally these nouveau-riche members of the radiating jet set flirt flagrant promiscuity in high society gossip columns…

Yet to the dismay of these same self-righteous defenders of Nature, one delinquent debutant after another still flicks plutonium ashes into oceanic suds. Watch as plankton—the planet’s quintessential dietetic resource—is overspiced with scrumptiously irradiated flavours, including Zataar, Tandoori or Balti Masala, Kim-Chi, with Ghormeh-Sabzi promoted on the way as an alternative to effervescent Gefilte fish and Matzah ball soup. It’s a breakfast for tsunami champions and truly food for thought for the UN Pee-5 nuclear club!

Undetected by invaders outside the Great Wall, megalithic Fire Ravens, steeped in a kaleidoscopic poison, rise in unison (after tracing the mobile missile treads of the Behemoth) to proclaim blood wrath upon the vicissitudes of human evolution—in pinpointing the Beautiful Isle, Okinawa, the satellites of stardom, Hollywood and L.A.’s Chinatown. All are within circular terror probability!!!

“To be bright as light, yet not to dazzle!” This ancient wisdom of Lao Tze is certainly not that of Pekinese Tarot players who now stammer clumsily railroading huge mobile packages into fixed indigo silos rotting with subsidized grain.

And they now possess new laser versions of war-fighting video games with near real time vision in the scientific struggle to defy the laws of gravity and humanity.

VI.

The Wall shattered; its relics are tossed by vandals into store front windows. Ignoring such ancient wisdom, Parisian Frog Eating Man Eating Cannibals and John Bull Roast Beefers must now cower, clutching withered White Compass Roses beneath ominous storm shadows. They fear being dragged deep into rasputitsa slush fields where spiked hazel nuts sprout like psychedelic Chernobyl mushrooms…

Every effort must be taken to provide the Leviathan’s old folks home with Viagra penetration aides and life extensions for Davy Crocket musketeers! Everything possible must be done to make certain that Tomahawks can slice scalps scampering through the gauntlet even more precisely to the tune of jingoist Beach Boy jingles fortified by the hypervitaminotic bull lips of golden arches―while concurrently pursuing the quixotic quest to establish a safe haven beneath the Golden Dome of a North American El Dorado. All in a hyperbolic high stake hyper-poker game for crypto-doubloons!

The Leviathan and the Behemoth care absolutely nothing for eternal Daoist wisdom―as both seek to cure the Mother and Father of All Bombs of their Oedipus and Electra complexes. It is a fundamental Axiom of Power: The ever-revolutionary means of production must always generate even more Bang for the Buck!

VII.

Phosphorescent Monitors and Merrimacks battle it out like great sperm whales and giant squids, their Poseidon Tridents now guided by iron-clad undersea Titan computers.

Melville’s war has lost its glory to the mundane utilitarian mechanization of the gatling gun as revanchist robotic gladiators with Saint George body armor tattoos join the fray.

“Where is individual honor? Where is chivalry?”

All history just rusts away until a split second of a blown fuse and collision of interplanetary space junk. All evolution is convoluted from a state of primordial menstruation, and ages to a purgatorial menopause.

Irrespective of political salutations, the enigmas of history are always denounced as bunk after the moment when the intrepid entrepreneur has come, seen, and conquered… with or without the Midas touch…

“Who forged this brittle metal? Upon what dire anvil? With what dread gas?” Exactly what was it you prophesied, beaming eyed Blake? Would the fires of Orc be stemmed? And what is that demon red with clouds?”

VIII.

If still not believers, then necessity dictates the abandonment of all idealist materialist romantic positivist prophetic theses! Even if Marx, resurgent, should claw out of his battered grave, who would recognize him?

History has sworn that he shall appear in the form of either Lazarus or Dracula upon listening to the mis-wired dialectics of dilettante computers―depending on the class perspective of optical illusions envisioned in virtual reality!

So what is the significance of history’s oracles, which conceal themselves within hieroglyphics, upon cryptic rune stones, or that whisper from the lips of bog men frozen for all eternity in enigma, or that are now hidden within steganographic AI codings?

What do the diviners say? Who will lead us to the Promised Land and promise likewise not to be struck down by the lightning bullets of assassins?

With no response to our queries, heavenly assurances mass like prefabricated masonry troops housed for tourists in imperial tombstones before the beaming eyes of Emperor Qin, yet untrained for crowd control.

As we press our bodies firmly against the catacomb walls of civil defence drills, we feel childhood lice festering in our scalps: Our hair leaps like the fur legs of centipedes to striped bandanas self-tied with a hangman’s knot to our necks.

Even now that wireless has converted the whole earth into a huge brain in Tesla’s prophecy become reality―not a soul has been enlightened: “The softest things shall devour the hardest! The meek shall inherit!”

IX.

It had already happened once…

The clocks had stopped at 8:15. A metal lunch box filled with boiled peas and rice broiled from the inside. The bronze Buddha smelted at 7,000 degrees. Glass bottles writhed like yellow serpents. A school uniform hung buttoned to a tree; the child’s body was nowhere to be found. A glass lens glistened from the eye socket of a skull severed from its corpse. The flash had evaporated the paint from the walls, the shadows of the bodies remain frozen for all time.

A young girl smiled with a broad grin outside a window of a collapsed home surrounded in rubble. An old man is carted over the road debris by his son. A solemn mother milked her baby whose face was scarred with deep burns. Warm winds approached from the distance; there were many small fires, as if set off by fireflies, smoldering.

Those at ground zero had disappeared in a white flash without a trace; those at a distance could not understand whatever burning horror had inserted itself beneath their leprous flesh. Hair dropped from their scalps just a few weeks later.

The pilot of the Enola Gay had watched the towering flames of Little Boy from the clouds out of the pure blue heavens once the bomb had hit Hiroshima. The pilot of Bock’s Car was supposed to have hit the arms factories and secret chemical weapons plants at Kokura, but on account of bad weather, he veered toward clearer skies and watched the blaze of Fat Man as it struck the populous city of Nagasaki.

A third bomb was prepared to strike August 18. The Leviathan had plans to drop three bombs a month in September, October, November—and up to seven in December. Niigata and the imperial capital and sacred city of Kyōto had also been listed as potential targets.

The new creators and destroyers of the world could sometimes be regarded on lazy weekend afternoons sipping beer at a distance upon roof tops in awe of the eerie glow of Four Corner fireworks. A few debated the post-mortem morality of their first unprecedented (and ostensibly preordained) decision…

Years later, the pilot of Enola Gay put it this way: “You hate to see them as collateral damage, but the weapon is non-selective. It has no discrimination. That’s the way I look at it.” His co-pilot shrieked, “My God, what have we done!”

The pilot of Bock’s Car never spoke publicly about it…

X.

Once is already one time too many…

A shower of flaming arrows alights the sky like the sun behind the flight of geese… Flame throwers of smokeless fire, emerald swords and three-bladed javelins with swift-striking shafts triggered by sound waves flash through the haloed sky through what seems a hundred suns, a hundred moons, a myriad of stars…

But then—no night… no day… all points of the compass utterly lost…

The rain falls in unexpected places… in new shades of black…

XI.

Blinded by the instant flash of self-fulfilling prophecies wrapped carefully within multiple re-entry vehicles, we cannot observe the contenders for the throne, only the multitudes who tremble in supplication before a flame of far greater intensity than that sparked by the silicon chips Prometheus once stole...

Who then dare stand against the fissionable glitch of an eclipsed fuse?

Dare those of the Marx-Mayakovsky-Maoist Yue-fu Poet Bureau? Those of the Nietzsche-Pound-Mishima Unity & Order Cult? Those of the elite Yeats-Eliot-Stevens aesthetic entropy? Or those of the poppy-smoking anaemic anomie of the Coleridge-DeQuincey-Rimbaud Oriental Romantics Club? Or those the booze-bored Li Bai(jiu)-Poe-Plath heresy?

Indeed, upon which leaning Internet Tower are all poet-prophets now babbling?

Upon re-entry into the sooty troposphere above megalopolitan slums, our eyes glaze as if coated by varnish. For typically exorbitant fees, surgeons operate on the ocular nerves. Once the corneas are removed, smog becomes as transparent as crystalline waters. Truth serum injected, confessions are demanded upon the torture racks of penal colonies.

The pins of acupuncture are now the devices of invisible inquisitors:

What caused your blindness? From what are you here to be cured?… Upon careful examination, we have discovered no such disease recorded in our texts…

For the time being, which sedative do you prefer?… Be faithful, and wait with patience. The research cannot drag on forever. Some prescription must always fill the blank.