Ain Ghazal farmers kept defleshed, decorated skulls in their homes
Along with big-eyed figurines, perhaps of gods or other ancestors.
The decapitated skeletons went under the floor. So much for memory.
Ten thousand years will do that, consume the beliefs held by buried believers.
Prepare then, to submit, evade, or resist. The emperor stood on his head,
Reversed, the face of an analog watch strapped to his anachronistic wrist.
He sank across the border, down through the gorge, away from town,
Away from farms and ranches, seeking out his bare rock, his mountaintop
From which to assert his rule was not yet over. He still meant something.
He still had the trick, the power of seeming to mean. He sat under Mars,
During the day, invisible to war as war was invisible to him, and he waited
For a native human American bearing a stone weapon to come
And either set him straight, in all unlikelihood, as if the world knew him,
Or to encourage and accept his analog sacrifice of the universe entire.
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