thin eyes

stares through the glass
nose gone rotting

into mouth
she can no longer clean herself

the morning food plate
iridescent with blood)

I must tell you about these people
how their kindness is a cruel thing
how they negate reality
in the pursuit of their forgetfulness

The cat is a prisoner
it sits on the windowsill with the cold wind
biting into a raw wound
I tell them they should put it down
they reply “it looks so full of life!”
I tell them life is a wretched thing

for a cat whose face is a weeping sore
I write this

I write this to counter your positivism
to bat the sun from your court
to tell you the world is stuffed full
like an over ripe fruit
full of lava
and in reflection the hosts that feed
upon its convoluted surface
are incapable of releasing the molten lead
that fills their mad heads

I write this to counter your smile
and your new age books
I write these words
you will never read

The cat has left its perch
off into the darkness
awaiting the sunrise and a fresh plate of food


I must tell you that we are all prisoners
of this rock
suspended in oceans
of space
we face the spectres of our selfish constructs
upon each beach of glass
spitted by a weather vane’s cock
redolent in pleasure’s vice

basking sharks lurk
devising spectacular diversions
to kill the question mark
that flowers in the inquisitive brain
to stifle intelligence
with easy solutions and the peerage
of star struck mystics
whose verbiage
swells like over ripe fruit
in the orchard of easy answers

that seek to choke out the righteous
horror question
that burns us to the core
marks us out
sets us apart
drives us into
the edge where things change
and possibilities occur

I ask you, whose mouth drips with sweet juice,

if by nightfall the terrors come? Do they march
rank and file like the retorts of guns
and harvest crimson petals
which glow like morning dew?

It is the fragility of life we face here
- out of season when the dark wind blows
and conjures cracks across the rendering of our dwellings.

Roving prongs of sunlight burn white upon
the hump of the beast whose crust we infest
parasitic and caustic, giving rise to inflammation
digging in

hollow in the night. Listening to forces scuttling about
hearing death out there. It is solid. It is a reason. An energy.
It seeks to murder. Look at the cat
Whose face is being swallowed by death;
it is being murdered.
Slowly.
Terribly. Clinging
holding

for all it is worth
onto the light
while its eyes can still open.
(for what else is there but the night?)