Cult

countless fingernails embedded in the
shower stalls that rain down acid

of every nightmare, projected like
the heavily spliced silent newsreels of

bi-plane skylines and Purple Gang massacres
in the bubbled cracklings of deteriorating

nitrate, leaving the blackened outline
of a holocaust victim; the lidless glare

of a strobe filtered through the spider-veined
parchment of its skin, lurching off the
chattering sprockets of vertebrae, and

throwing chaos into a clockwork sluice
that sets in motion the next death star cult