Poem: Contagious

 

 Contagious

somewhere in a graveyard of sand crawling over itself

a bust on a coin tilts unconscionable,

its single sunken eye an iris-drowned. 

 

armies once slashed each other into dead soldiers

for the king on its countenance.

 

blood speckled its tarnished surface,

a fierce luster, contagious, beacon of war.

 

the greater the slaughter

the more valuable the weight,

a heft inciting blades to pillage and froth,

 

until one of those soldiers,

or some bereaved queen or lover,

stumbled through the mounds of corpses in anguish

and tossed the coin down.

 

now it claims to remember nothing,

and waits for no one or anything,

vast in its apathy of victory erased,

somewhere in  a shell game 

of borderless dunes.

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