The poems of suspicious men

Some nomadic idea storms in, rushes out,

Pitches its tent with small mesh windows

On the splayed open books, the meanings sucked off

From fruit segment blanks, words rounded like mangoes.

Every hour, on the hour, the news pours into the room

In thin trickles of blood, sometimes a red torrent

Splashes the dark outside, makes the roof

Sag and cave in, beaten and bent.

I’ve been reading the poems of suspicious men

First aloud, and then in headless whispers.

A small pebble of loneliness rattles around

A tin-can of silence gripped by uneasy fingers.

I can’t call any of them my brothers or my sons

Because I don’t really know how their body fluids compare

With the thickness of water.  Just that an arterial sheen

Pours into my spaces everywhere.

I’ve been listening to the delirious murmurs

The senseless shredded silence within walls of prisons

Sometimes a crisp sound stops the feverish memoirs

And smoothly eddies around ideals of freedom.

A tin-can jail and the high-shiny walls of suspicion.

Thickened trickles of fluids. A few pebbles of poems.

The thickened trickles of voices of those men

Clattering in the deep emptiness within them.

Some speck of an ideal jerks like a mote of dust

Trapped in a sunbeam slanting in through doors.

Bangs the high-shiny light-walls with its balled fists

Touches the pock marked table and the pitted floors.

The news comes in bursts of staccato fire

In the sounds of torture, the twists and turns of mayhem.

Small flares of defiance stamped out everywhere.

The sheen of fluid on a pebbly poem.





Linked to : Poetics @ dVerse