Speak now or forever

I wish the dead would speak

more quietly, no louder

than other whisperers at weddings

but from closing-in walls they growl.

Do they imagine we can't hear

them, only sense their displeasure

at each unweighed vow?

From the east they look down

upon our inconstant avowals of love,

and from beneath our feet

where their names lie heelworn

reproach me for the tainted gift of mine.

How this breathless moment is filled

with the revelations of ghosts.

I wish the dead would lie still.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet

Moment of release

A week has passed away

since he lay down on the dirt to bleed

his way to heaven.

Since then he has made a home

for a bluebottle maggot colony

and lies consumed by the fauna of his own colon,

distended with their gas excretions,

and creaks like stretching leather.

At the moment of release

when his abdomen splits and implodes

it is not his spirit ascends

but a fountain head of metallic blue flies.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet

They came to

How they came,

they came to

came to wait,

wait our tables,

unemployables.

Ignored, unused,

unused to traffic,

human traffic,

barely human,

laid bare.

They were laid.

They came to.

(c) 2013 Slush Poet