A World Raging with Teeth

One of two poems read at Invoke the Muse in Old Post Hall, Tacoma, WA 7/17/14

I am a dead memento

The wary, no, weary captain

Of a great star ship

Hammered by time

With the endurance and patience of a pocked moon

Or a mother lion – wide with her parcels

There's been one-way conversations

Soulless wavelengths and remote beeps

But with no client to rig the lights

We are streamlining to a blackout

The contributors, they’ve all closed up shop

Lenders are engaged installing dumps

And I cannot find a sterile facility

Or land us on canny ground

With this fine vessel

Once the epitome of riveted elegance and style

With a certain equity that can no longer be endorsed

Her primed mortars and Diamond Cocaine paint

Passengers calligraphed in saffron ink

Stars next to each minister’s obscene body

Now the economic outlook is best suited for an oracular humorist

Somewhere in life we picked the cheap flight

And repairs are expensive in the deeper dimensions

You know, even as canned corpses we fall to black in the ledger

So now...

Mostly out of boredom, fellow voyagers

Out of rank distaste and simple defiance

I will attempt to land this vessel

With tender pressure and one last shred of grace

We are each to become unwilling explorers of the world below

This has been your captain speaking.