hospital bed.

Beginnings

and endings come here

with nothing such as divinity

or blessed cans of oil and incense

baptizing our souls

into eternity.

Nothing but ugly, fleshy, mortality,

the decaying stench of defeated microbes.

In brief flashes

that shatter time,

years slither away, forming milky pools

of withered age at the bedside.

Medicated synapses

are misfiring,

sending mixed emotions

to the conscious realization of an end.

Ghosts of past friends roam

the space around

the body melting under fluorescent lights,

fragile remnants of pain

and joy destined to be lost forever.

dead letters for living people

    

waste.

Watch the glass shards

within blood coursing rivers

through arteries

shattering and imploding.

The innocence sold

for a glimpse of the afterlife.

Plastic voodoo people are shot down

by St. Peter’s goon squad,

shoot first

and ask for forgiveness afterwards.

The streets are over-run by rejects

that were kicked out of paradise.

    

Paper thin people

crying from the steps of the Pearly Gates;

their eye’s leaking sacred fluids

that can be injected

by eyeless junkies to get a quick fix.

There is an onion skin girl-puppet

caressing the cuts on her legs;

inserting vials of poison in the wounds.

They’ll bring a good price

from the surgeon.

The money will buy her a ticket

out of town before anyone realizes

how much poison is missing.

The air swells from the screams

as the shootings cut down the junkies supply.

Paper thin corpses blowing in the wind,

collecting at the feet

of prosthetic angels.

dead letters for living people

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sugar for medicine.

Days, nights, and hours pass through me

like the tap water

dripping on my toes.

Sitting in a tub filled  

with water that smells of iron;

     

a damp cloth on my head,

a folded towel at the arch of my neck

to keep it from the harsh

constructed coldness.

          

On the toilet beside me sits

my new King that may be the 

blood of a dead savior,

it’s a five and a quarter bottle of ether 

that tastes like burnt strawberries dipped in molasses.

The bottle is half empty.

She walks in,

with tones and rhythms

that would only be decipherable

to a blind aborigine.

There was meaning in her voice

but it was lost

in the cooled air conditioned atmosphere

and the thick syrup of my thoughts.

          

She grabs the precious elixir,

smashing the bottle

over the edge of the basin.

Glass shards like snowflakes

cutting up the skin as they land.

                     

The red-violet fluid makes effigial tendrils in the water.

I remember this girl

as the mentally prepubescent child

I met years ago.

     

I watch her burgeoning womanhood

for the first time.

dead letters for living people