Source: Bart Everson https://www.flickr.com/people/11018968@N00
It feels like living in a sizzle reel —
a jump cut waking nightmare shot too bright
for gritty city scenes where off clothes peel
while below grates are steaming in the night.
Some words are words; some words are garbage trucks.
They carry steaming piles of dumpster lumps,
and all the rained refuse the dim can chuck.
Becoming too laden to make the Dump.
And that poor word is broken down in funk.
blinding white light,
followed by:
ice cream brain freeze —
above
&
between the eyes
like a red-hot poker
boring toward the pineal gland
some reveled in that feeling
others thought they were test driving hell
but whatever else it may have been —
IT WAS.
i’ve got no time for silent shouts
they take too long to vibrate my bones,
and i’m not sure that Time even exists —
maybe in the sense that i exist,
but not in any REAL sense
mystical snapping fingers
keep slapping me up against the NOW
and it hurts in the incandescent filament of my soul —
the part that precariously wiggles,
under constant threat of sizzling out–
and — in doing so — would leave me a dull boy
In days before hell swallowed,
I’d sit on a bench reading news,
and watching how lead ducks followed
while marching down in ones and twos.
They went into shallow water —
floating time bombs, drifting slowly,
wishing they hadn’t sons or daughters
to die among creatures lowly.
“The end is nigh! The END is nigh!”
called a junky from yonder shore.
He was twisted and floating high,
and had too much of being more.
But now my window sits broken.
The land is flattened as my mind.
Moving lips tell not what’s spoken
from a vantage point wedged behind…
He held half-baked ideas in
his twice-baked brain.
He’d grab his umbrella when they
shouted, “Make it rain!”
–the umbrella he should have left for a
friend stuck home under the weather.
But his glasses were bent out of shape, and
he was hell-bent for leather
So, he couldn’t find his coat, nor gloves,
nor ass-less chaps.
And, thus, was running better late
than never — perhaps.
He couldn’t afford to miss the boat
that had sailed, my friend.
He needed his job, ’cause a penny
earned was one he’d spend.
When told he was skating on thin ice,
he maxxed out the AC.
All his blessings were disguised too
well for him to see.
He’d thought he was okay when told
he had stiff competition.
–the nuns taught him to fix that with six
Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition.
But they said his co-workers were
really on the ball.
He’d have gotten a Pilates chair,
but was afraid to fall.
When he heard the new guy was up-and-coming,
he got up and left.
He wanted to be thick as thieves so he
went out for a supply closet theft.
There’s famine in the heartland —
lungs full of the blowing sands.
People huddle near the fire,
waiting on the news, sans wire.
But the news won’t get better
by the time you get the letter
it’ll long since quit being news —
it’ll be lyrics for the Blues.
This isn’t a gentle tidal temptation.
It has the power to pull eyes and minds —
the mighty diesel pulling from the station,
the force to strip the fruits from rinds.
That savage gravity can’t be rebuffed;
it won’t let itself by staked, strapped, or cuffed.
This horde had huddled down in the alley.
Past hordes had hid to overlook valleys,
but bucolic hordes are a beast long past.
The valleys, farms, and fields are too vast.
Like roaches hide in walls, they need tight spaces.
Unidentifiable by faces —
they’re only known en masse, not à la carte.
They’ve many chests, but just one beating heart.
I’ve heard it said, they eat both girls and boys,
and that they spit out bits of clothes and toys.
But that may be a horde-hating rumor,
like that they grow together into one tumor.
a headstone
worn unreadable
stone outlived bones
fresh flowers
and wild tufts of grass
tell mixed stories
granite mourners
draped over gravestones,
unweeping
no pyramid
is so sublime the Pharaoh
welcomed death
the potter’s field
has mystique unknown to
mausoleums
