#iagreen

[ishmaelsbones]

The tide

Despair coils and billows like a ship’s rope and sails.

It blooms like a dark lily--

its perfume, a reminder of death.

It settles on me, a cloud of fine dust beneath my skin.

The darkness, moves. 

It lifts my limbs and fingers before easing them back

into unnatural stillness. 

[ishmaelsbones]

I am being born. This is but a contraction.

[ishmaelsbones]

All I want is to suck at the teat of forgetfulness

and never

open my eyes <\p>

[ishmaelsbones]

Warning

If you kick the mountain We will bury you In a mighty avalanche of our Resistance. We will swarm you like ants And eat you alive.

[ishmaelsbones]

Fleeing on foot we take with us only our breath 

that ticking bomb, that ticking clock 

Like coins into a wishing well 

We throw it into the wind

[ishmaelsbones]

False Gods

They have made a god of suffering, these artists As though it were not the most common tawdry thing in the world Knowing you will one day die. Even the flies know this And mate in a feverish daze.

[ishmaelsbones]

Neighbor

I hear the clicking in the wall, 

light switches flicked on and off 

as they, too, search between their two small rooms 

for the reason they originally came here:

to their other small room 

to this apartment complex with its hospital hallways

to this difficult, cloying town. 

In the tepid, shallow bathwater 

I hear water dripping when my ears 

have drowned in water

the plunking interruption like a finger tapping 

on the wall of an iron room.

I realize 

it's the lurching gasp of my heart 

magnified, malevolent 

in my silent watery tomb. 

The music I use to forget

unable to drown out its grasping, incessant beat. 

Then I wonder in irrational fear--

what my neighbor hears, of me.

[ishmaelsbones]

Social Anxiety

And when I am dying my soul will say What wasted energy we spent Of this, your one precious life Worrying about what other people thought.