Shadowplay / Nightmare Thrum

This grim tangerine
bruised by daylight.
This grim brinkmanship
masking in its own eyeteeth.
You rock adrift.
A lover wrapped in muslin,
caught in the sleeper sofa’s hush.
Lichtenberg figures fillet your back,
branching like bright frost.

Shadowplay.

Despite the pessimism,
the taxing of thornbacks
and other small griefs,
the malnourished drag king eats
beneath the hovering axe
that never falls but threatens.
In the dim ’30s and war-lit ’40s,
fleas circled your wrists.
They found their register
in the upheaval lived in the shadows.

Nightmare thrum.

I tender you my seven firearms
for review — for the workshop dreams dashed
in Franciscan corridors. You find:
A Guest in the Hatchway, Flash Hardwood Stab,
the chill of my touch sealing,
then the searing world shut.
I’m the sergeant-major of nightmares
driving my vision into your plastering light.

A grim tangerine indeed.

What I’m Reading:

I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats . . .

— Luis Alberto de Cuenca / “William of Aquitaine Returns”