A WISH
let me run manic thru an empty world,
climb disappeared structures and hang upside down from their spindles and branches,
leaping out of windows that aren’t there to plummet towards dumb intersections
and hills of red grass.
let me lay among lilies and chase imagined lovers,
feasting on flowers,
breathing a pulsing static,
tightly gripping the air between my hands.
let me sing wild songs of deterioration in ecstatic terror!
let me gasp and choke on my own beautiful loneliness!
set me adrift in an ocean of inverted apathy!
let me worship at the base of my stone impulse!
grant me every unnecessary freedom and subdue my tired body!
spit me towards the sky and i’ll glisten against the stars before freezing into a unique
haunted crystal like i know i always was.
FULL BLOOM
against a sudden tirade of engulfed terraces and gimp mesas
a tempting tiredness tries to tell tangled
versions of the future like shuffling a deck of cards
deducing entire weight-bearing freight balloons’ worth of ticket scores
in a matter of small millennia
unsheathing fantasy and nightmare within the tiniest crack in
the concrete siding of its insane headquarters
towns, entire towns populated!
it’s madness!
the sheer excess
the vast unrepeating difference of it all!
and sourced from what?
these are all the people I’ve seen
not knowing how to remember could be another problem entirely
and then there is the question of what to eat
my god!
am I just an s-curve?
plotting the trajectory of my own established ignorance?
giving no leeway to the whims of my dry axis?
fulfilling my allotted course?
exalting expediency over form?
efficiently coasting?
rising and falling according to some distant and arcane law?
or am I the lights at the fairground?
screaming upwards away from the dropped hammer?
fleeing in exact relation to damage taken?
not quite ever reaching full bloom?
designed by a rigged system?
denying toys to children?
costing an arm and a leg?
requiring upkeep?
maintenance?
surly employees?
arcing but in a straight up and down?
slowing towards the top of my jump?
not wanting to begin the trip back down?
not wanting to notice the moment that gravity shifts?
that I become my own decline?
that along with me, the hearts of others are also sinking?
that I’m a better-luck-next-time?
or will I smack gold?
hit my head on the ceiling so hard that I see stars and hear tweety birds singing?
will I make a colorful sunbang?
will I cause a smile?
will I choose a beast?
will I leave satisfied?
will I return?
or have I already been?
will it ever happen again?
A PRAYER
I imagine slamming my head hard in a door until it breaks and spills open and pools on the floor and I dance on the brains and step on each piece and each nerve until it bursts and the juices splatter on the walls until they dry and get crusty and hard and I imagine birds eating the dry crust and throwing it back up and cats eating the throwup and dying and the birds eating the dead cats and exploding like they ate rice or like I smashed them in a door and worms and grubs growing out of the muck like gross aliens and oozing in puddles of my violence and breeding death until they grow into morbid copies of my unkillable hate forever and after, amen
Colin Ferguson 