COVENANT

Our legions are marching on the City of Rain, our bleeding bare feet, bone against concrete, tearing ruts in the King’s highway. We remember the lash and the hole. We remember Babylon Ballroom, silver trays of cheese and meats and candy-twist liqueur, the splay of light tinkling wine-filled crystal, but later, hunched over our books and tearing at stale bread, we recite the lessons we will teach you soon: there is no difference between palace and prison, champagne and hemlock, chandelier and gallows. When gunfire rips at the hinges of dawn, we will decorate lampposts with your heads and feed your tongues to corbies. When pyres of burnished mahogany roil the skies of Hell, we will kill you last, saving you and savoring as you boil in the dying screams of your children. Pinned to the wall like butterflies, you will hang in the grand gallery twitching for centuries among the handbills of kleptocracy: your economies of fraud, grifters in the boardroom, jowls dripping with grease, your genocides of neglect, sucking the bones of your feasting tables clean while abandoned children and stray dogs fight for scraps in your alleys in your roach-ripe tenements in fields scalding with immigrant despair in the flesh-caked machines of your factories in your third worlds on your oil-soaked beaches in extinctions that once were forests aflame with birdsong in the shadow of church bells tolling beneath your mansions. This Do in the Name of Commerce, but we are your shareholders now, flooding down the Valley of Chrome, like rose petals and ticker tape and gun oil. JCMT