Hunger burn fire
Lightning in my soul
A time for dying and living
Crush the skull of the skeleton
Grind it into blood wounds
And be born again, in darkness
Time frozen in the universe’s belly
Insects descend upon the castles
Feast on corpse-lovers and decay-queens
Let me have this final chance to say
That there’s no going back
Apparition here
Flashes in the shadowed night
A familiar face
Some ghost from way long ago
Coming to take her revenge
Blood burn spewing vile hatred
Inside this hideous twist cycle
The same screaming from you
And the push into the grinding
Leave me alone, will you?
Can’t you hear me crying?
Or do you like the taste of my tears?
Specks of dust, winding roads
Murdering fathers in dim country lights
Times for mourning & sheltering faces
Times to pull starlight from chest cavities
And drop it into chasms in the field
Listen to the bursting of the earth
Sweet jasmine smell of decay
And bloodied bed sheets
Soaking with animal lust
I told you things would never be the same
But you kept driving anyway
And now we’re going to die here
Blood moon melting sky
Gray death cloud choking nightfall
Lonely city stranger
Please, come save me from myself
I am running out of time
Doom-soaked city
Wild fury monsters
Howl into night rain
Remove the flesh from my face
Reveal the gorgeous skull beneath
All my memories you will erase
Resentments that make me seethe
Crack my skull, drink my blood
Bury me in the field over yonder
Do it now before the floods
When the Devil’s land is conquered
The world wakes up each spring
I notice warped smiles
Birdsong is back, hideous
On sunny, manic blue-sky days
An energy is something
You feel in the body
The way trauma is stored
Each time psychosomatic
Tensions mount
A naked man smiled at me in the
Bread aisle, and what a smile!
I noticed the weariness of
His wrinkled face and I remembered
Not everything is well
There are sycophants among us
They hide in sticky crowds
They could be anywhere, believe me
Spring is a time for violent vigor
And a harbinger of obsession
The sensual beauty out there
Sometimes hides the disdain
And the madness
Extinction is the only way. It happens slowly. I am walking in the winter streets; everyone is a stranger. Even the people I know. We can’t know who people really are. Maybe this is a side effect of grief. There are considerable and small losses, but they accumulate over a lifetime.
Continue reading “Extinction (a prose poem)”
Last night in the pouring rain
I heard screams inside my head
A laugh, too, then a guttural cry
All the pain and feelings, the dread
Soaked in the torrent, lost, confused
The city is a maze of waste, gore
Faces don’t look real anymore
Held at gunpoint, bloodshot eyes
Bated breath, I have been defiled
Rain washes down the windows
Red as the poisoned blood
And to think that I never loved
A soul, a hole gaping in my head
Where the worms crawl in
The laughing man pulls the trigger
Heads explode with tremendous vigor
I sit here, wet, left to wonder
If each lightning strike
And rumble of thunder
Is a sign of more death
And unlimited hunger
Of destructors
(Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash)
