We beheld a city of hypnotic scents and rhythms
looping trails of lights like fireflies
swirling around spectacular buildings
air vibrating with thousands of voices
chattering like crickets
electrocuted tumbleweed on power lines
interiors washed with overlaid sound
cool-air-swept and timeless
deep pile carpets and mysterious dials
interfaces for minds obsessed with chance
randomly built from desert ground
randomly filled with purchased anticulture
ten days could have turned into a year
until fallen from unreal horses we wither
as the unarguable earth drains us
reminding us about scale and size and time
the labyrinth of dreams and canyons
and dreams of canyons
and deserts apparently beaten back
that reappear as dreamed deserts
crowding the psyches as lights and sounds
deserts in which soul water disappears
and Jerusalem and Babylon become one
the soulless mind craves shining things
the thrill of risk and reward in the glands
hormones racing through tired veins
the heat, the cold, the heavy blue silence
and the endless dark layers of music
the mind wants to be seduced over and over
led through stranger and brighter ways
labyrinths of the real to match
the endless unreal dreamscape of every night
and led by the mind we risk being truly lost
becoming one of the unreal, shining things
a mirror image of a vanished someone,
dark energy rushing through hardened arteries
and God hardened Pharaoh's heart
and the plagues were called down
and the seas were ripped back from the sand
blood in the rivers and corpses in beds
and no land of milk and honey, only
sun-hot rocks, prophecy and stricture,
holy cities raped by every soldier nation
and the invincible, eternal desert uber alles