Herd Lyrics

The hunter asleep

In the skull of Descartes

Awakes from his bed of sand

Light paints the cracks in the ceiling

Of the fused bones in the pantheon

And in one side of the dome

Cool shadows lurk

In which red marks

Smeared with the juice of crushed currants

Tell the story of a herd

Of pigs, crushed shells

The inside of which

Are the glazed memories

Of equations that construct

Bi-valves, make a sound

Like rattles under his feet

And with one arm braced

Against Descartes inner brow

He urinates through

The philosopher's socket

He yawns

He has slept through

The Information Age

And without knowing it

Survived the plague of fiction

That contaminated the data

And brought the world's cities to ruin

The first to go were the virtual ones

Though curiously these left

Physical traces: dents, imprints

Crenellations not dissimilar

To those his body, pressed into sand for eons, deposited

Lava's dirty orange river flowed in

And his form was cast into an icon

His work has too survived and he realizes now

Seeing it separated by light years

How little resemblance the image bears to anything that was