Poems

Our Little New Atomic Age

Out again with your blue-grey filter 

calling for that darkly, sick boyhood,

    the search for years you cannot 

Un     cover— they dredged 

            the coastline twice and then said Goodnight 

       and you kept going; wondering, wishing, withering from

            the sinking

feeling, 

       the wrought belief that

Love is not a shallow plunge for you— all the Reverence that 

makes critics laugh and audiences yawn, 

drags you down and drags you over, 

its tongue around

the boiling depths of your 

                  reef. It drips and it dives

it dines out on the salt-soaked flesh, wearing

a crown of murky stars and milkweeds 

for your bed cloths,

   

   it brings you around its waist and tosses you to

and fro its broad chest;

               it ravishes white foam after white foam, 

tearing wave into wave into wave

from the hot, wet current of

your mouth: And they said Goodnight 

as you kept swimming; sifting, scintillating, savouring, 

         sanctifying

               the scale-covered and many-eyed deep; 

the fork-tailed and sea-fanged and covesiren death-serenade;

I love you, I love you, I love you—

         My Destroyer, come and kiss your creation,

                           come and sing my many lungs to sleep.

 

West Ambrose is a scrivener and performing artist. If you want anything published in The HLK quarterly or The Crow’s Nest, just ring for the masthead, and let them know!

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