Flash News

Scientist says: meme for belief in life after death

Old man sits bespectacled in laptop moth-light.  Rendered absurd—

warmed by un-canned laughter and crackling fire-breath

(Sound-bites for both now!)—

because he couldn’t see the afterlife of that Word.

Speckled by starlight:  You smoke-sigh and observe

What?  I stare at you looking.  Blank!  Crack open the sixth seal

Whilst you speak the weather of our little world

(Wednesdays it rains; pumpkins pockmark; cushion-thief strikes)

again I imagine it forked by lightening, white above again and

the blood below.  Pause.           I think I just want to really feel.

Un-pause.  Furl my sparrow wings poised at the precipice and reel

Back to lupine-winds, fire burn and chthonic cauldron bubble.  Incorrigible night

in which sailors drown at sea because I let the glass ring on and

on—the noise the dream-world appropriates for its own

but you Break it with a smile and portion and peel

these days to savour, or discard; not feed the eternal angelic fight.

Still I turn from peat-smoke laughter and librarian’s plight

To where, in street-side window the octogenarian sits: caught

in the—“today there’s been fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes”—tv-light

and wonder: do I have it, or no? this meme of after-night

On the threshold of genesis, in what purgatory shall I persist?

To that, your pancake-batter skin is the warmest retort.

The days still dis-leave.  Pale envy-green, wet-yellow, gold-wrought

Over-thought in the tail-end; by day at poet’s sea of glass and fire;

(too hopeful by half in the dawning).

End-tale:  November song seeks mist-blue port, so

Defying stormy-weather and determinism both, tonight

I only say: there’s not much to report.