Do not speak of it.
Do not see me.
Give what you have to give,
willing or no,
and don’t mind the scars.
The remnants of your gown,
oft removed,
keep us coming back for more.
But, in time,
you will womb a tree
that reaches to Heaven.
***
[Art by Zdzislaw Beksinski]
He dreams of things with tattered wings, open mouths, and lolling tongues. Heaven’s impostors, fallen from grace. Thirsting but never slaking, they lie impaled in the pines, their chill voices forbidding all who may think to touch.
Art by Zdzisław Beksiński, untitled.
In a moldering dream,
I fitted a woolen sock
over the stump of my leg.
The two middle fingers of each hand
were missing,
the knuckles paper-skinned.
A presence studied my learned motions
and nodded its approval.
~Now you will stay~
~Now you have learned~
***
image credit: https://pixabay.com/users/mysticsartdesign-322497/
~In my mannequin dream, she walked with a limp and a clack. Lurched toward me with a doppler shift, as sure as a coaster’s chain drive. Her face- a calamine complexion, flytrap lashes, cheekbones of rouge pasties. And I, rooted, felt the come-hither hell of china fingers.~
2:43 a.m. and I get up to pee. There’s only the night light, knee height. I shuffle arthritic, steady the wall, when a white thing bumps my eye like a drifting balloon. In a hissed whisper, “bitch” it says, imploding its albumen, stifling my breath. I don’t have to pee any more.
Melting Man
has the night terrors
Malignant faces
Pointing fingers
Nodding to each other
with icicle noses
long hands
and obscene gestures
~Man of the Melt~
Cover yourself!
Fold ye down into the foam
where mildewed spirits cannot roam
Call ye spiders and millipedes home!
It doesn’t look much like you see in the movies. Well, depending on how long you leave it sit, it changes colour and gets a little syrupy. Marge put in for two weeks’ vacation, so no one has thought to call here yet. Once I had cleaned up a bit, I took a few days off too. Just camping, bumming around, sipping Johnnie Walker. Not much fun, though, when you’ve got something in the back of your mind. So I slacked off on the drink last night and decided to drive home today. Jesus, it smells. So many flies. Shouldn’t have left her on the counter.
In the wrenching spell of nightmare,
something cadaverous,
phosphorescent on the forest floor.
Bleached as if drowned and months missing.
Current-carried, caught on some subterranean thing.
Tell me it isn’t you.
Tell me.
Oh, my love. My life.
Under the sea
Under the sea
Life is much better
Down where it’s wetter,
take it from me!*
I was strapped to a stool
facing a desk
on a concrete floor
under a hot light
Behind the desk sat a Mantis.
Unusually large (s)he was.
Triangular visage.
Opaque eyes.
Saw-toothed arms, chitinous wings.
Elbows on the desktop. (do they have elbows)
It wanted me to play the shell game.
With actual shells.
It lifted the centre shell
and placed a copper key underneath it.
I knew it would fit my locks.
With a whiz whiz here
and a whiz whiz there,
it stymied my eyes.
Then chittered out some tiny bubbles.
I was to pick.
Left-hand one: empty.
Right hand one: The key! I had done it!
Whereupon it raised up a grassy palm,
stopping my reach.
Pointed to the centre one.
I lift.
It’s me, miniature me. Runs around with a puny scream.
Mantis makes a grab. Stuffs mini me into mandibles.
Reaches out with saw-toothed arms…
*Disney
With planned barbarism they came.
Safety in numbers.
Their eyes as dead as a Great White’s.
Jittering on their hair triggers.
Never questioning the barked orders of their commanders.
My house of precious ones scream from their interrupted sleep.
Boots on the floor doom doom.
Screams cut short by gagging sounds. Ballistic noise.
And I, with rebellious heart,
try to find courage, think of action. Too late.
With fists of iron they drag us outside
under sputtering streetlamps.
Multitudes of scarcely-known neighbors
in lines on the night time street,
crying, shouting, begging.
Random rifle reports,
not warnings. People fall.
The squeaky wheels got the grease.
And I am trying to calm down,
hugging my own
with emotion scarcely shown
until this night.
“You are the father?”,
one of these brutes says.
“Come here. Stand here.”
The shark eyes look into mine,
and my only thoughts,
my last thoughts,
are “why such black automated hate?”
“does he not see me?”
“I am a person”.
SMACK. He hits me in the cheekbone with his gun,
and I stumble, bleeding.
The children scream and try to help me up.
That is a mistake, for they do not want you up.
But I stand stupidly.
Brute puts his hand under my chin, and tilts my head back.
And then, and then.
There’s a bang and I fall in my turn.
My teeth shattered, hole through my palate and on and on.
I swallow and swallow, but there’s too much.
Why.
Why.
Aremyfeetofftheground 