Still Life with Three Skulls
I wish I had a card heart,
strawberry-red & molting;
But I am
inverted & blackened: who wants
to be the ace of spades?
Three friends who cannot engage
the brown spirits:
speak evil, see evil, look
to the stars for a sense of perspective.
Candle svelte like a V2,
a thing like a tongue, backlit
fishnet cathedral glass.
Everything's in the cards
if the cards are marked & there's
a sodden old handkerchief tucked
up your sleeve. Perspective
gets distorted when you're yucking
it up with the boys. O to be
a joker instead of the suicide
king, always plunging
the saber deeper when
all you wanted was to
scratch
what itched
you & carve your name
into the table
before getting lost toward the bottom
of that unlocked dresser drawer.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
from (C)OVID'S METAMORPHOSIS, Book the Fifth
Calliope sings: Persephone's fate It's too late to question the logic of curses, to second guess why some birds deserve h...
-
Cast the first irregular stone at the fat prince in his high keep, keep the huge box from whence Deumus will arise in the form of a g...
-
Follow the lowing of the cattle, the tweets & re- tweets of red-breasted robins to find him. His dominion diminished ...
-
Late in the game, an inscribed stone unearthed, its hymn written of the basilisk born outside the skin of time. The cock crows ...

No comments:
Post a Comment