By: Peter Magliocco

black caviar with leftovers

trudge into the nightfall
of hungry consciousness
& taste fallen fruit left rotting
from a long-ago banquet.
your daughter is nearly eleven,
her bare feet pad softly
across the mausoleum floor
where leftovers litter the tile
no longer waxed by hand.
there is always a taste of honey
when dreaming of the afterlife.
yet you’ve died many times before
being a normal guy who worries
like a coward on the guillotine
watching his own head falling
beyond night, into the basket
of (un)consciousness
where lovers eating
become the feast
for gourmand worms
spoiling the menu

==========

Indian Summer

Light seeps through windowless doors
warming wood with the sun’s eye.
I’m on the crest of a fallen rainbow
singing about love & Judy Garland,
taking the minutes in stride
I begin to downsize disappointment
& seize the day from Indian summer.
The almost perfect picture will
paint the glen in perfect harmony
with natural & man-made colors.
Before the sun sets I ride shadows
back to the dawn of creation,
seeing what camouflages our dreams
from the rolling thunder unmasking them.

==========

The Writing on the Walls

Resplendent as graffiti on toilet stalls
or like initials lovers carve into trees
signifying their eternal devotion,
the art of writing destroys the walls

separating you from reality’s rainbow
& showing (one & all) tales etched
on the surface of digital visions
in both biblical & pagan cuneiform

inspiring creation of a new alphabet
to ascend freely above the pages
of what once halted words
from the unvarnished truth

==========

The Heartbreak Tattoo

There will be the gun-shots of the night
(always!)
taking past from present, sundering us
from the comfort zones of ill-logical contentment.
for the beginning of dread
is when you must realize
(always):
the shaman’s blood is upon you,
& all things are possible
in your life contradicting all the beliefs
you once believed in

To reveal the body’s essence
of a figurative folly,
shattered by the unstoppable violence
of those gun-toting administrators
of a renegade bloodshed

& the mothers of victims cry in the nocturne’s blight
over their slain offspring, or lovers:

time must cut free the heartbreak tattoo
embroidering the scarred remains
the bullet’s homing incurred in suddenness;
stripping clean the skin’s grief-shadow.

everywhere the homeless walk the streets
while dead flesh rises to revamp the world
for the cause of the noir-damned.

One calls to me across the intersection
of crimson scenes:
revamp the night until the stars
see shadows, please?
everything is possible for time-healing
in this ever-mortal landscape of ours,
where the neon city breathes itself out
with ceaseless traffic & sirets …

Embrace me then, “the bag lady” Mother
who walks like a penitent on the gravel
of your festering hypocrisy
with an everyday particle lingering
in the biohazard of your brains,
kiss these lips of infinite chiaroscuro
etched upon that desecrated skin
you neo-Nazis make tattoos of
(in heart-beats bleeding)
old residue of some evil’s design
the void imprints there too
your divine spider crawling up our flesh
I found nesting in the womb taboo,
territory of cul-de-sacs
marking mortality’s drive-in tomb

O flesh, shudder
to remake the world
in your image

==========

-Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active in small press circles as writer, editor, and artist. A multiple Pushcart Press and Best of the Net nominee, he has work in many online and print publications such as Harbinger Asylum, Midnight Lane Boutique, In Between Hangovers, Green Silk Journal, Pulp Poets Press, and elsewhere.