Is darkness asserting over
Bodies of the groping climbers
Venturing into wilderness
Lawns of I-got-mine’rs?
Do the brutal grabs
Of ice defenders
Tear the baby from the breast
And cage her worse than crime?
Buy more perfume dispensers
To breathe perpetual
Clouds of ambivalence;
Switch off news offenders
Interrupting production consumption
Production consumption.
Is it dark in those lost
Cots lined up in warehouses
Across the continent
From disrupted love?
Fumes imitate flowers
Creeping into our brains
And make us think it’s movies
We can watch or ignore;
Two hours with popcorn
Then off to our comfort doze.
Those in projected shadows
Stay there crying,
Robbed of home
By desperate hoarders
Fighting alien cancer
Eating up our stuff.
How to be the spark,
The member of a miracle
Outrage undoing deformity
Instantly
When months, years, lifetimes
Pass into dumpsters
Engulfed in fake flower fumes?
We don’t have to know
How life is unquenchable;
Breathe upon the coals,
Oh, Breath invisible.
Send up in smoke
The shells around us,
The self-inflicted scales
On eyes searching catalogs
Of new scents to cover up
The rot of which
We would be healed.
Excruciating transformation
Cut away our skin
And see we are within
A self unknown,
But warned of,
Breathing one another.
Mark R. Turner
Julian, CA
July 6, 2018
