Caged comes in many forms
The omen needle into eardrome
The sour scum parasitic
So snaking ‘round guts
Slow churning
Fast burning—a scry o’ rock
Licked new for the poisoned bite
Of Adam’s apple metamorphose rite
Imprisoned songbirds
They are barred
I see, I witness, I inquire loud:
“What purpose does a song have,
If not to pine for the window
Before the wings were lost?”
Thralldom has a taste
Ebony leech muscles drain the strength to
Pull and push and palpitate
Sticksome strings webbing slaving chains amass’d
Here at tied wrists mine insides do quake do ache
Like shivering drawn moving works of blown-glass
So again, this third eye
This swelled orb that leaks
In the bondage of sanct’
Rotting vectors crept foreordain’t
Gleeful to mind, hungry for fate
Calcifying in camaraderie
The Gogh, the Kevorkian
Sylvia stuffed in an oven
Prometheus liver taken warm
Chthonian beings snapping
Two fanged below
Hungry gods suckling on harvested teats of woe
Knelt weeping under the holy shadow
I was there
O’ dearest, crumbling Colossus of Rhodes
Clapped asunder, I still sense
The flowering phantasms deep
Down and down
And down into
Sparkplug darkness, all sensory t’pique
Where now redcoats march
As electrolytes of antiquity
—so many deaths I die
I have not the skill nor iron
To perform otherwise
Had I known birth itself was a scar
I would have laid hidden
But ‘tis done
I can not sink
Can not yield
Writhing from every sniff of the lung
Cursed to born and born and
Gouge forth new in each havoc song
Saturn’s child reaped from empyrean’s wheat
Nerve endings firing, bloody organ pumping bare
Shackled to life
Somber clinking from Nyx’s womb night
Here am I, still alive—l’héritier solitaire.
Reblogged this on Larkspur Horne and commented:
Throwback Thursday! One of the first poems I ever posted on larkspurhorne.net, but it certainly wasn’t the last!
Originally posted: 09/03/14