M.A.D. by David Harsent

It will be the rat, he told her, the rat that first emerges
from the crud
and crap after the infinite rapture of the megaton strike,
its head
slick with what it burrowed through, what fell, what kept
it fed.

You and I will close and fuse, bone seared to bone, flesh
folded in.
Our silhouette will print the wall, one subterfuge, one
skin.
Joined as never before, but joined, as we would have
wished, in sin.


There were men in the seas of the moon. The great hare
lay dead.
What they seemed to speak were broken lines of some
unbroken code.
What they seemed to hear was the voice of God howling
in the void.

Earth was a rolling abstract, its blue-white trappings
dense
in darkness. They named it terra nullius. They were
drenched
in starlight, dead light. They scuffed the dust as they
danced.


It’s nine, he told her, can you see? Nine, which multi-
plied
by any number reduces again to nine – vows of the
woodland bride,
choirs of angels, fleshly portals, nine versions of the
road

to Gethsemane . . . Bad luck, of course, to dream in
nines
but it can only have been in sleep that I saw them,
rat-clones
in a whirlwind of ash, the city burn-out, the broken
stones.

http://davidharsent.com/