The great honeybee exodus was short
I stood on the fountain’s edge
A podium from which I would deliver their sentences
With neither a word nor simply gesture, they returned
Attentive and embracing they gazed into the mechanical eye
(Address to the Honey Bees)
This face you see is not painted on
You strive to make faces where faces do not exist
I can give you these things that you yearn to find
You are no longer victims, yet there is still no cure for this
The Mary whore lays dead and no longer cares
She left you subject to the mechanical eye
Your fountain, the water, she feared
There is salvation here
I can show you where the path leads away
From this desert waste and to the ocean
This fountain is only a single drop
But you will need new faces to see the path
(Command of the Honey Bees)
With my mouth I controlled the currents
Each was commanded to smash the windows
Of the honeyhive homesteads
And with the shards that fell into the sand
Cut in pasty skin a permanent face
For nearly an hour they carved into each other’s skin
Slashing without any form of guideline
The sounds that boiled from this flesh pot
Made me worry that the sands would shudder
And swallow the hive in some horrible quake
Presiding over this sacrifice the mechanical eye
Saw the sands become a muddy pit
Honeybees fell, the artistry continued
Until none were left in my congregation
Stragglers twitched, waiting for the path to become apparent
With my arms spread out, I enveloped the courtyard
Once again this disappointment that inevitably follows
It was never as surreal and esoteric as I had expected it to be
I burned the hive
The water so full of the dead it was undrinkable
The town had become a waste
There was nothing of value there without the water
I took my leave into the desert
My head ached; the destruction of the hive
I wished I had at least salvaged a suitable bed
Back to sleeping in the sand
Without something to capture the attention
The mechanical eye drifted without course
I laid upon my back; coercing sleep to accept me
In and out; not knowing where sleep begins
And where the waking world ends
Some blurry in-between where things are warped
And sleep is more like nighttime hallucination
I saw an ocean of drying bodies
Thousands of honeybee bodies
Carved up faces with mouths and teeth
But empty sockets where eyes should have been
A hundred thousand miles of Nothing