People just keep checking out

forever:

Wits savage enough for prophecy

Straight backbones with x-ray vision

and unheeded verses

Malcontent hearts ready to recycle the heated shrapnel colonizing their guts

over years

over voices raised

over the choking scrape of verbal metal on membrane

ready to expel ancient buckshot newly honed

for the slaughter of aches and ignorance

I would quote Ginsberg but

his long truth is all wrong

now after anthologies

I would say why not others

any random sampling of the mundane mass

of less than lambs

upright on pale feet

wrapped in child-crafted throwaway single-season size sevens

innocent of the weight of annihilation or

the meaning of that word

in conjunction with any reality in which they star

I would say that but

It would be wrong, wouldn’t it

to ask for sacrificial stand-ins

cheap substitutes

death spores wandering

amid untimely removed kernels

of brilliance

and light

and hard-shelled compassion

Wouldn’t it?

I would howl but

in empty rooms

the screaming echoes

rebound

gain force with each pound

against rigid absence

take on too much momentum

to swerve around the creator

who gave them shrill life

cannot avoid throwing her

to the floor of the world

still searching for the annulled

the ghostly whys

her friends