The Nature of Things -- The Workings of Chaos

By: Machiavelli Posted on: December 26, 2005

It dreams of legs, it dreams of thumbs
Of smiles
Dreams of pearls and likens them to towers
It grooms seamoss hair and cups the curvaceous breasts
Matching them to dreams in tongues

Smirking, works the marine into man
To pave his forests with gills and litter his pastures with turned sand
That is maritime footfall
Slender legs' intimacy joined into impersonal scales,
Much as canopies close their comfortable spaces to become laps,
Or mortise and tenon

Those who swim freely are work wrought and burden borne
Upon the landlocked who lack such curséd form;
Such that gillroads and finhouses pressed upon the grass
Do tempt frustration of Maya Herself, who in Her infinite Wisdom
Did demonize that grass to think for itself
Give Her rocks to the building of Delos' bridge and condemn
To Nissandar and Nicator their lungs to command and breathe fluid
That they likewise wield staves to alter the natures of their kindred
In their own right, gillroads and scale-clad windows of their command
With it, dreaming

It dreams with Her, and She is ever dreaming
Paint splattering, fingers smearing the spattering
That Her Red might make violet of Blue on a finite canvas
When granite separates the Bastion and the Jewel and draws their blood
Much as, as much as it draws them together
Much as, as much as fires fight forests, with their canopies,
Or provides brine as congregation for a lone hazelnut tree
(Again making barren fertile laps)

Scales are mudcaked faces[,] and legs
Legs are torn fins for offal-caked gnolls,
Who tread among drypolyps of "flowers" and feast upon terran minnows
That are the staple of the lung-cursed

It is those dreams, and it builds itself
(Much as She dreams)
Moves Her Mind, and Her creations
Deals with Her dreams as it did Her Body
Plunging within the canopies and parting flesh
Into parallels that build roads from stones or shells
And spires from iron or pearl
Of its breath, they rend Her ground;
Of Her Breast,
They both build brazen dead faces to honor brazen dead faces