THE POSTMORTEM
Your doom and your disappearance
are but two of death’s deceptions.
You won’t ride with the Valkyries
or be served by any houris.
Don’t expect balance and feather,
an accounting in a ledger,
an inquisition by angels,
the companionship of sages.
You’ll have no Hell/karma/Heaven —
judgment’s privileged to the living.
Your remains are genes and atoms,
and memories are your statues.
O MOON
Shakespeare was too polite calling you inconstant.
You’ll flash your waxed silver clit for anyone.
Your fabled vagina spawns the stars and poems
But when I most need you to arouse
you hide, as though demure.
LIMOS
With her hardball knees
and basketball abdomen–
Hunger never plays
The Greeks knew Hunger well,
daughter of Discord, sister of Ruin.
An amalgamation of bloat and emaciation,
she once inhabited Aethon’s innards
to make him devour himself whole from within.
But the Greeks knew Prometheus too.
He gave men writing, math, and agriculture.
He gave them fire, and he even restored
the hope his sister had withheld.
All to keep insatiable Hunger at bay.
Hunger’s bony snowshoe feet
bear her shambling ramshackle corpse,
spindly jolly roger crucifix protruding.
Her empty burlap tits hang from pegs,
her skin a crisp parchment
lettered by visible veins,
tightly bound to volumes of bones.
Her cracked and crusted lips
mouth equations of halitosis and dust.
Her cheeks sprawl like abandoned adzes,
her nose like a rusted plow.
The ashes of apathy show from mineshaft eyes
after an unremembered fire.
The Greeks knew, of course,
that Prometheus would be
punished for his impertinence,
fettered on Hunger’s barren Caucasian mountain,
Aethon dining on his liver.
PASSIO
I knew from my earliest youth
my destiny as a martyr
so I majored in high abuse
and I practiced my stigmata.
Via Dolorosa to crucifixion
became much harder.
When my ambition came unloosed
I lost my consuming ardor
for fire, for stone, for ax, for noose.
I instead became a writer
to put my schooling to good use.
Dumpster Fire Press 