
‘Parliament of Rooks’ and other poems
By: Benjamin Thorne
Parliament of Rooks
—for Oscar Wilde
A brooding black tempest hovers, then descends.
The meeting field swells with rooks, the air groans
with raucous caws that circle the guilty one.
Gathered from all realms, the hang-man court,
juried by birds of like-marred feathers
and cemetery grim. How brief the cohorts
met in counsel, reviewed the case, and broke!
Reckless precious aesthete, now rescind
all hope! Caught and deposed, reviled as smut
despite all artistry, your trial was done
ere the day began. This vicious carnage
makes you (no saint) a politic martyr.
What remains, but ravished gory plumage
like foul sooty stains, dead curls of smoke?
i sing of cummings sad and small
I sing of cummings sad and small
whose vervist genius recoils at dumb-
ness and unthinking shuffles
to and fro the side of Country
‘tis of you and me unwitting of creative nobility
oh say can you starve our artists with Burger King
and Flashy Things of crepuscular value.
He just—
whistled;
famed balloonman,
living (a sublime soul as per example)
in a land as yet unfurnished with culture
but La-Z-Boys (reclining
into his seat of contemplative poetry)
steadfastly refusing easy ways
to say his intellect and other things
preponderous, for unless critics lie
his words said “I will not touch your worthless prose.”
Still, he sits in Norton shrunk, compressed
by love song’s company, but not silent
in acclaimed white retirement.
Green Ammunition
Ladies and Gentlemen, we decided to reinvent
our ammunition, so allow me to present:
the new environmental round!
It won’t sully the pristine ground
upon which your dear child’s found.
Surely we can praise the ambition
of our military’s new PC munition!
What’s that? There’s no peace in our heart?
To which do you object, the steel or tungsten part?
The Drowned Hundreds
—The Titan and Adriana
So much ink spilled, so much airtime filled
about rich men lost exploring
the wreckage of lost rich men.
A tragedy, of course.
Yet of the hundreds
little is said,
an atoll
of poor
dead.
Fear and Loathing on the Oregon Trail
Dear Ma, it’s Tuesday, day three;
Margaret died of dysentery.
Last night thieves stole a pound
of food; on t’other hand, we found
three strong oxen under a bush!
(Too bad a snake bit John’s tush.)
Our merry band’s now down to ten—
damn, now we’ve lost two more men
(seems those oxen weren’t so tame!).
Day Four, and Bill’s horse went lame.
We shot ‘em both, so now we’re seven,
no make that six, Julie’s gone to Heaven.
A spider bit my eye, I can feel it swell;
oh, and Mike’s last words: “Don’t drink from the well.”
Thank God tonight’s the Donners’ big party!
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Benjamin Thorne reads and writes poems when he “ought” to be doing any number of other things. His work appears in a number of online and print journals. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.