Tag: poem

Netherworld Named Living

In the great blue fire

covering the city of ghosts

like a well-loved receiving blanket

a wisp of smoke is birthed

from a frigid heat.

What is her name,

this queen of the reaping?

She is a gossamer phantom

with sky ambitions.

While flames whisper through windows,

she skitters in and out of the

bluejay’s lungs,

recycled.

On the fiery airstrip,

the dying plane resembles a tongue.

Her voice is a soft sigh,

a sort of escapism from exhaustion.

The fire climbs through the

ghostly metropolis like a

twisted ivy,

unconscious of her seed rising

to drift elsewhere,

air for a tree in some

distant netherworld

named Living.

9,19,29

Today I am 9, 19, 29.

I look out my window to the used days,

see saw toothed predators

hunting my small, oblivious

head in the long grass.

I am suffocated by the

fire and brimstone perfume

of my own being

as I tiptoe back and

forth between heaven and

hell each day.

I long to let my hair

cascade down my back,

to strip naked in the

unblinking square

and ask the strange things

with six rows of teeth

to take my shame from me

like an unwanted cloak.

Yesterday at dinner,

I was a vulture vivisecting

a yellow canvas,

my talons raw as milk.

The End of the World

At my window,

A gun.

In my mind,

extraordinary sexual and living acts

Demonstrated in dark colors.

 

Then a great red bang.

 

********

 

The scales of the grain feed

Sway with an unconscionable math.

 

After the man’s house grows rats

to provide epidemics,

One will advise you at home while you die –

Grateful to be out of the hail of the heat.