James Cavanagh

 

Hello?

The polished rail of industry
wends through forest masquerade
born in the age of gods,
crosses the abyss
where all the broken lovers
lie lost to vertigo.

Fungus! all droops rotted.
Subterfuge! all collapses.
Façades beguile like advertisements,
crumble into wishing wells.
The fist! the fist prowls the shadows!
The fist haunts the night!

Angels flee, the fool sleepwalks.
Soliloquy! time for the damn soliloquy!
Despair and fear in concert crouch,
sip their breath from silence kept.
Abandoned railway siding
rusts like the dream at dawn forgotten
from an unmade single in a lowland nook.

A young girl steps from masquerade,
too much time
in hushed echoes and no one there,
walks steadily through quivering shadows,
dreams of weightless dance
and the beauty of a pirouette
in a lover's ready arms
reaching past the edge of echo's dawn.

 

Only the Bought Have Access

Dry winds rub the dawn,
blisters tumesce at the edge.

One year the snows failed
and the rivers ran empty in Spring.
No floods brought new lining.
Womb strains slipped of the egg.
Seed rots in burlap dockside.
Sages have all gone silent,
consigned to the wings
like unbid items at auction.

Deserts crawl into wheat fields.
Corpses ripen
swollen with gasses
in an air too thick to escape,
made thicker by spasms,
bile and the last of bile.

Abominations too great for telling
poke through the thin shell of comfort
like dawn through a drunkard's dreams.
And no eye describes. No mind remarks.
And the emperor sold all the books -
schoolrooms and libraries
traded for a last campaign
raising the stature of wealth.
And as numbers speak volumes on price,
mathematics can't count the sorrows.
Death cries ascend, echoes resound, stone
blinks away tears.

And the glazed eye blinks into faith
as arms merchant pitchmen
embroider nonsense with nonsense
on talk shows in the day, on
news shows in the night. What difference?
And the marketplace for gunnery hums
a dirge for brotherhood.
Hopes of high hopes -
peddled for a few photographs
smooth with concepts and pride
no kin to the beak-pecked faces
gleaned of meat as of meaning -
a pipeful of lies
for an age mortgaged like oaths
and all the blistered tomorrows.