Herd from Sleepwalker by Hourloupe

The hunter asleep
In the skull of Descartes
Awakes from his bed of sand

Light paints the cracks in the ceiling
Of the fused bones in the pantheon
And in one side of the dome

Cool shadows lurk
In which red marks
Smeared with the juice of crushed currants
Tell the story of a herd

Of pigs, crushed shells
The inside of which
Are the glazed memories
Of equations that construct

Bi-valves, make a sound
Like rattles under his feet

And with one arm braced
Against Descartes inner brow
He urinates through
The philosopher’s socket

He yawns
He has slept through
The Information Age
And without knowing it

Survived the plague of fiction
That contaminated the data
And brought the world’s cities to ruin

The first to go were the virtual ones
Though curiously these left
Physical traces: dents, imprints
Crenellations not dissimilar

To those his body, pressed into sand for eons, deposited

Lava’s dirty orange river flowed in
And his form was cast into an icon

His work has too survived and he realizes now
Seeing it separated by light years
How little resemblance the image bears to anything that was

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