Thursday, January 28, 2016

Debtor's Prison (a poem)


Black eyes, magic shadows
Presaging a change in
Cosmic ambivalence

The devil's due his debts
From those who despair

Red ink fills the diagrams
Of our flesh,
Tattoos of justice unknown,
Undone,
Unreachable

Eventualities sing
The choir of loss

And we pray:

Kill me with those black,
Black eyes.






Okay, some backstory here. I wrote this quite a few years ago after an editor friend of mine complained that very few of the poems submitted to his magazine made any damned sense. So I sent him this one, which very much on purpose makes very little sense.

He was amused, but not enough to pay me to publish it.

Oh well. I actually like this poem, no matter what it does or does not mean. I'm sharing it here for the first time.

No comments:

Post a Comment