Towards a Contaminated Pond
Skin mates
Forget the poisoned rain and PCB’s.
Arm in arm, let’s head on past the deserted railway tracks,
The dripping wires transporting madness.
Hand in hand, let’s wade through soft lily fields
And dance on lush red trumpet creepers
For the wedding lawns have been cut and sterilized,
The golf courses flushed and trimmed
And our bellies are stuffed with seedless watermelon flesh.
Let’s run through open pastures rolling in cloud cover
Resembling exploding faces with ever widening screams,
Sea horses and cosmic orgies,
Dissolving the armies of barbed wire posted signs
Blocking our escape from gulp buster trash
And the constant need for more.
Echo skin mates echo.
You who are the shadows of my youth
Resembling dizzy swaggering pirates
Seeking a plank on a sinking ship
Continually attached like a syringe in a weak vein
A thousand years from now I ask your faces shine
In opaque skies filled with restless whispers
Above lettuce clouds
Crisscrossing a thousand suns.
May your photocopied fingerprints
Travel like bone biblical chaff
Along the elite corridors of greed
Burying an avalanche of profiteering bankers
And moronic war mongers laced in chicken thin skins
Thriving on humanities blisters.
Oh harmless freaks
Floating belly up
Our reflections fear nothing!
After all, the toxins inside this pond
Equal the toxins inside us all.
Or have you grown deaf
To the church bells chiming
How unclean we have always been?
Skin mates
Remember the gas masks
For the ceremony of fire scorches the healthiest lungs
Before sending us sliding into quicksand
Manufactured from bloody classrooms
Draped in caution tape and unending
Weather forecasts.
And yet,
Even though I am limp,
Heavy and heaving,
Waiting for a quick pick me up
To sweep me back into my boots
I write these words for you
Beside this contaminated pond.
You who can barely consume.
You who wear the hard hats.
The dirty aprons and rubber gloves.
The dust masks and bus drivers.
The rubber maid angels and cleanup crews.
The nurses and teachers.
The aliens born on this planet aching to be reborn,
No longer torn or disguised,
Or worse insulted and bombarded by fabricated ailments and wars,
Venom induced cures, resulting in the wasted hours of apathy and bloodshed,
Symbolizing the worst form of treachery.
Skin mates before the ink runs out,
May my pink sticky flesh
Laugh at the raw scratching
As I lay here, open like a wound,
Flaunting my faults, stained with glue,
On a quest for new songs
Found in an oil stained turtle shell
Placed against my loved one’s fragile ear.
