like puppies felled by semi-trucks. Your whole left side in atrophy. Coliseum bricks to sand. Money isn't there to build a tower from the shattered dream. A bed sore on a stagnant heal started as a simple match. Fate struck it once and set it down; the nursing home ignored its flame. A cruel aberration lives to rub its salt in open wounds where knives were called to meet gangrene. Your stump is dregs of submarines brushing paint on razor reefs. I'd like to promise happy codas, promenades, not flat soufflés of suffer's eggs, not anorexic whale bellies batting down some stormy shore. Festering myths of medicine have offered sour miracles and promises they could not keep. My fathom bench is useless nipples on a breast but all I have to offer you. There will be bytes of burning chilies torturing the days ahead. The presence of another fall will always be some albatross. Youth in plaster peeling off from ceilings made of blistered glass. You can't rely on paper masks, and tissues of a tear will tear. You'll touch those eyes like pepper flakes; people stare injustice down. They aren't afraid for you. It's only the signal of mortal crops that shaves their pages, turns their heads. You can't revise the bones they stole; you can't demand reversal here. You'll hate a chair, despise a crutch. My words are merely Vaseline on poison bites from scorpions. Like lilies after Easter Mass, those stalks are headed for the trash. The flood-fill key must come from you-- tapping some artesian well for oats and bran of groping sane. Shady veils of courage shrouds are all you have to push away: threats of tombs, caves of graves, vacuums of depression's womb. by Janet I. Buck |
