The bird swooped down and gobbled the lot!
The petals swirled like dancers' feet
under a sky of burning tin
Pinkish mica fell from the sky
the sullied birds digested floral rot
giddying across the blossomed street,
'Let's get going, let's get moving!'
Sophie stared into the blue, while
Scattering grace and greed
You bit your lip and tasted copper
The grasses crushed deep into the rot
and the soil cried out for more
More people, more scars upon the land.
The wind whispered in the parched leaves
And the sky cried blood and gore,
Sophie still stared into the blue, not understanding,
The burning trees, the burning Amazon forest it crackled and whispered ...
where the void of time can find no end
Raked by fingertips of fallen angels
Raked by fingernails of fallen angels
we stumbled by, hand in hand,
"say no more of love to me until
you refrain from tormenting me"
The glue of years is in my ears
and I am stuck on a memory that shivers my soul
The evil around me envelops all and
The sunlight is struggling to pierce the gloom;
When the angel of heavens get to know this all
I sit and wait. Tethered. Untethered. Not sure why I started waiting.
Tomorrow we will start again.
I am a horse. Mane like the dark indigo unfolding of the prairie sky above.
I am a cat. Stretching my furry belly to be warmed by the sun I love.
I am the sun and the sky and the prairie. I am the wind in between.
I am the dark root beneath ground waiting for the piercing wet.
Who can know what ante-chambers I have threaded through, in my stillness?
But tomorrow the bursting upwards the emergence the new light!
If only I dare step past my own shadows
past the ever-widening sidewalk cracks
where the trees overtake the gray concrete
going towards the shine of the sun
'F--- that! F--- that!' cried the parakeet
The solar flare singeing the tips of their feathers
The beauty of life fleetingly made itself felt through the cacophony
That actually feels like two lines to me.
That actually feels like two lines to me.
But who’s to know?
That which we call a line...
May be just a word...
O r s c a t t e r e d l e t t e r s
But finely, finely finally
Written as part of an open-call exquisite corpse for National Poetry Month, April 2023