Poem: Asking

 

Asking

 

i shed embers of you,

curled in a pose of moths as

thick as ash drizzling so

much lust onto Lethe below

craters of fog

and i become

 

a shaker tethered at the soul,

R-I-P in a saturnine trench

next to mister gone, sad and hurt,

a trio coming apart in leaflets

of muscial rorschach fonts,

walleyed clowns impossible to interpret,

micro-expressions of acoustic adventures 

of a scream.

 

and we all skitter as we spin,

eight-ball puckish, into a 

corner pocket of a heart shocked by

the judgement of horsefly-sized tears and

 

i

 

see the moon is a jawbone

from an extinct race,

once flirted with Milkiness,

gardens of planets,

butterfles ineffectual,

until all that joy

shrank down into a closing flower as

large as a nebula:

constellations of pistils,

pollens of stars.  this

 

convergence of undergrounds where

 

the once great prance

fell into a whirlpool of aftermaths,

a wither of orbits brutal and

hungry and solar.  a place

where there would be implacable

bones, dunes of husks and cratered tears

all asking why.

============================

9/24/25 ... switched poem to present tense ... brutal wrangling with this poem all day ... tired from grading papers

brutal semester, size of all my classes doubled in size by admin, chance of no poems for a while, let alone essays.