Sunday, March 21, 2010

The enormous, laughing woman

rolled into the room
like a jovial boulder of
blubbering flesh, emanating waves
of saccharine good cheer
more insistent than the Great Boston
Molasses Explosion.
She oozed over to the black and white figure
slumped over in the unpainted wooden chair,
and bellowed in a tornado-siren voice,
"What's wrong, honey? You look flatter
than a roadkill possum!"
Not bothering to look at her,
he replied, almost inaudibly,
"I can't make the fear stop."
The gelatinous mass of femininity
next to him burst out in a good-natured
thunderclap and shouted,
"Well ain't that the shit!"
She wrapped a quivering mass
of friendly arm around his shoulders,
squeezed him like a Moon Pie,
and then snapped his neck like a Popsicle stick.
"Hope that helps, sugar," she chuckled.
Turning like a small planet rotating on its axis,
she exclaimed, to no one in particular,
"Some folks you just can't talk to,"
and orbited back out the doorway.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

He stalks his prey

among the knife-edged rocks
of the bludgeoned landscape,
the circling pterosaurs screeching ravenously,
the death-gray sky stretched over him
like a rack victim.
Eyes brimming with formaldehyde, he zeroes in,
and the shotgun once again coughs out
its bored mutilation.
Trudging without interest through
the liquified remains,
he ignores
the satisfied cries of the reptiles
as they feast and gorge,
and rams two more shells
into the infinite chamber.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

There will be no

joyous reunion tears,
and no one will take the newly arrived pilgrim's
trembling, expectant hand.
The beatific visions will dissolve as the
movie screen
fades to black one last
irrevocable time.
No scores will be settled,
no outrages will be assuaged,
and triumphant justice
will remain silent
and unexpressed.
No idiot tragedies will be undone,
no screaming obscenity of suffering will be reversed,
no lifeless child's body
will ever laugh again in sunlit fields,
no grief will be cradled in silken arms,
no Hollywood fantasies will be fulfilled,
and no union with the All,
the One,
the Ultimate, and
the Real
will be celebrated in
cascades of sense beyond
experience.
Their only consolation
will be that being consoled
will no longer matter,
and all that has been
will no longer be,
as they return to a time
when no time
existed.