The Satellites are out Tonight

Through smoking gums
and lava teeth,
my tongue of flame
whispered crackled consonance
into your damp ear.
You drowned
on the belly swell of ocean rock.
We sifted your ashes
from the pile
and planted this tree
out here in the desert.
The dustbowl sun
etching tall stories
to scrape the sky.
We rested in your oasis cool,
watched your
petrochemical arms grow,
reaching into all corners of Eden,
shooting up steel,
smoking glass,
shimmering in the heat haze
of your runways.
Your concrete hair,
set in ‘high-rise’ style,
was matted
with chewing-gum loop motorways
that navigated your skin,
the carriers of your sin.
For here and there
you were naked
in your poverty and famine.
A contradiction
of population sores,
patches on your skin.
rock, sand and stone,
glass, steel and chrome,
plastic, fantastic.
A symphony
of mobile phones
prefab homes,
traffic cones,
garden gnomes.
Colours that faded,
grey as bones
in their dusty tombs.
The desert would move,
here one day
gone the next,
exchanging sand for pixels
as the smallest currency.
Flat-screen twinkle,
wide-screen stare,
full sensory support.

In the last days
a star shall fall from the sky.
There is a meltdown in Eden,
and the satellites are out tonight.