Sky-sculptor's Show

As a delighted child
I watch the deft adjustments
of the sky-sculptor.

Stretched rudders and distended torsos
melting in high noon's cataclysm:
graceful gestures to the marionettes of cotton
looking on in admiration from nearby fields.

The horizon splays its fingers,
swallows me in its porcelain veins.

The cardiac presence of many-hued transversions
blasts me down the patchwork ribbons
of tar, stone, and light-particle antibodies.

Each cattail or dandelion
a thousand-scrolled papyrus,
oscillating the whisperings of sages
through the automobiliac breeze.

A sheriff golden with anxiety,
pewter helicopter,
squat box-truck spewing squid ink,
row upon row of cubic blasphemies in the median
all swarm like hornets in an abstruse alliance
of manufacturing at the altar of the artifice.

The effulgent veil
of a cumulonimbus dragon
dies in a burning fit of laughter—

a slow death, ecstatic
with the comprehension
of the tragicomedy
of heaven versus earth.

Lights so penetrating
they outshine the sun.

Stenches so garrulous
they outtalk the ocean.

Toxins so noxious
they poison themselves.

A cultivator:
dull green leviathan gormandizing grain and dust
and the thoughtwaves of one billion crickets
roars in antique fury.

And somewhere,
empathic carnivores weep
for the trillions of insects
dispatched for vegetarians
to make the bread they eat on a picnic
while they watch the sky-sculptor's show.