Poems from a Stillborn Heart

I looked for your car for an hour

just hoping god would intrude again.

We'd screamed our throats hoarse and

then

we'd lost the world war we'd waged

against each other. We were both so tired

we'd forgotten that no-man's land used to

be a gazebo where we'd share tea and

interlock fingers, place forehead against

forehead and feel the warmth created

simply by our wandering thoughts.

Now blocked,

across enemy fronts those ramparts were

once painted with

daffodils and come what wills and flightier

fight the world

fancies than intercontinental missiles.

Gravebound were all our desires

of yesterday and tomorrow,

now they dance the bone-crack waltz of

corpses glad to be risen at armistice and

their eyes shine infant then crone then

infant then crone.

Bayonets separate and pull way from

stomachs

that they seemed perfect for, and the

trail of blood stretching brings to mind

lovers' lips parting.

And the downed airmen

wreathing the sky with their plummets

look like rice at a wedding, as they race

to their ending they're savoring the

unlikely

Welcome to the years of lead

where we bury ever rising dead,

and the violence in the global south

is the vomit choked back in our mouths.

Welcome to the years of lead,

where they'll shoot you point blank

in the head

for recording simply

what was done and said.

Welcome to the years of lead

when you're thinking of Pasolini,

there's nothing to rhyme about his killing...

just the wounds and police reports