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Like a language fugue in plague minor,
like a brain fever that elates the imagination,
it begins with alien utterance in our midst:
tongues transformed to babbling towers
that swell from between the teeth
and trumpet nonsense sibilant and dense.

 

While neighbors drone fluently
in dialects that stretch their lips
and stretch the lines of their features,
those uninfected stare in speechlessness.

 

As unsettling as the jaundiced auburn sky
where reflected images of our cities
now appear to blur, elongate and dissolve,
it begins in the open marketplace
with Tarjal the tailor.

 

A strangeness inhabits his eyes
as he deserts his stall and hurries to his shop
to cut and stitch great pleated coats
that fall from our torsos in crumpled folds.
Sleeves for which we have no limbs flap in the wind
while our own limbs remain bound within.

 

A generation past we wrought the hecatomb
which emptied out this world
for our sovereign exploitation.
Unknown to us its slaughtered populace
sought vengeance in our veins:
nanoscopic viral snakes, coded to coil the DNA,
corrupting our cells in a planned mutation.

 

Alien values reverberate within our skulls.
We crave foods that burn our bellies,
which provide no sustenance or taste.
We caress the throbbing lumps beneath our flesh
and accept the sights of our altered vision.

 

Those indecipherable glyphs now make sense.
We understand we have sinned against ourselves
and travel by caravan to their desolate hives
to don abandoned lives as a kind of reparation.

 

On the solidified gel of fallen panes,
where decades of dust have mold-congealed,
we sketch the figures of thwarted deities
with our gnarled and native walking sticks
as the auburn winds begin to wail.