Terra Cognita Part 9

9.
The constructed photograms of the self,
faces that never age nor fade.
Motes from the morning in the slant
of the light in afternoon ballrooms.
The slow drifting swirls of the sea
as seen from high Earth orbit.
Slabs of raw sky stretched over grids of green.
Roads of rippled steel across the wastes of Antarctica.

Slim soldiers, sunken into torpor
behind the concertina wire.
where trees dance without the wind.
Far-off sirens slash the sleepless dark.
Nails scribble love letters on stainless steel walls.
In the room of crystal walls and burnished floors,
our fetishes hover behind slabs of glass:
soul suits woven of dried weeds and reeds
sewn by leather fingers with strips of dry skin.

Aluminum tubes packed with chatting meat
shot like bullets deep into the dark flesh of dawn.
Pillars of poured stone. Buffed sheets of bent metal.
Songs injected in the ear sanding dreams as smooth as glass.
Signals always arriving from the clear and endless air,
while at the South Pole a white eye stares
without blinking into the deep, blank silence
where our signals go out and go out but no answers echo.