Why does this mutt whimper
while lying on the table
before his euthanasia?
Does he not know of
the lush, oak-covered fields
and meat-mounded hills  
that await him just past the horizon?
Or is it because
his owners do not realize,
a pup inside,
he still has the will to run?

His kicking legs ache as his heart cries, "Why?"

With frosty breath and empty-shell shoes,
I await the steady driver who returns for me,
to hurdle our car down cliff into sea
with cracked headlights and bowtie come undone,
what more could Night or Water honestly have won?

Moon painted gleam masterfully upon my eye
from falling trees and ivy-shined leaves,
whispered in their ears from knoll-bound knaves,
"The sun gone over, never to return for you."
They watch for pleasure, sent-to-ground from dew.

I ramble on and on along rocky coast line
over iron guard rails with trusty companion,
head-tilt weighed a stone above water,
gone plunging in toward black surface below,
face-first and tongue-tied with heart so hollow.

Up, up, awake. All but a dream.
Soaked tie above bedframe,
slept in mustard blood sheets.

All cats,
curious and lazy,
are cleft-lipped.
All humans
are a posteriori-lly
dependent and nosy.

There will be
no scheme, no rhyme, and no reason.

There will be
no rules to abide by
during the production of the artwork
intended to be presented
on the Calling Day,
when all and every
who are to proceed with the ceremony
have guns pointed at their backs
and saber-long thorns dropped,
point-first,
on the tips of their toes.

There will be
no way to tell the difference
between the lines stenciled on the walls,
which wrap from corner-to-ceiling
in spiraled diagonals,
and the blood on the carpet
sprayed out from bullet holes in the flora
that knelt below the windowsill.

There will be
no murmurs of triumph on the Calling Day,
just thoughts escaping the stratosphere
from those who will witness
the living unconsciousness.

Prayers will be
seen scattered
upon the surfaces of stars.
Our lives burnt outward
though our overcast skies,
projected up and up and up,
imprinted as shades
on that day,
the Calling Day.

Easy, my love,
I prefer easy love.

I'll find it in a place where the women swoon
over my desire-frosted blue eyes and granite jaw. It's not you,
it's a need that I must fulfill and it piles higher and higher within
my body, my soul, needing to express itself in soft moans which rise
louder and louder at runner's pace, those looks of longing and lust that begin
over whiskey in a smoke-filled bar, that end amid our scattered bedsheets as her and I
pass a bottle of red back and forth, listening to our soft-spent breathing, our gazeless stares at the walls
of the empty, windowless room, knowing never to see one another ever again, never again on a night like this.

Sadly, it's all I want now,
but above all, I want for nothing.
Gone away, my easy love.

These two things I remember:
the lights dimmed slowly
and then went dark,
and my mouth was filled
over the teeth, to the lips,
with dirt-ripened maggots.

Those little mongrels had grown inside me,
my saliva was their nourishment,
my cheeks, their protection.
They nestled so deeply into my gums,
in the crevices where cavities were to grow
on the walls of their ebony buildings.
We were beautiful
but none would call it symbiotic.

Illumination ran away,
far off, bounded for the infinite fields.
The light lightness left me.
I don't know who was in charge
of sending the charge
through my electric chair.
I grew to embrace the seat,
that splintered piece of wood,
the pain in my sweating palms,
and the metal clasps which restricted my arms.
It gave security to impending doom,
the promise of finite end.
The wooden back
gave rest to my love-ridden bones
so I tongued my friends
straggling about my chops
in comfort and pleasure.
That chair, those lights,
they were empty vessels.
Built for, but never meant to,
fulfill their purposes.

That is,
until a bulge-eyed, masked man
connected the current.
The lights went out
and maggots filled my mouth.

Bubbling liquid in my veins
boiled to temperature my temples can no longer bear,
so the skin splits and flesh lays bare.
It destroys itself, what a clever defense mechanism.
What a putrid smell.
The world around me is smear-splattered in paint,
orange and incision crimson, the two blended so coarsely
that I groan and moan as I writhe on the floor,
cackling echoes down dead metal hallways,
smoothly polished so as not to rip hair off the scalp
of a man who decided, no, it's of necessity,
to press his skull onto the beam to cool himself,
to press his forehead so hard, in,
that his eyeballs begin to bloodshot
and ooze bulge tears out of the sockets,
forcing his desperate, drastic inhale to catch a grain
of stray sand that his teeth grind down on,
back and forth, hard, producing more pain,
imagined into reality as fire and red-hot coal
burn in his mind,
sparked by thought of the life force that flows
through him, and how it kills him to
never escape it. Dependent on something.
Let it die.

I feel for him, that man surrounded
by inescapable, bloodthirsty anger.
He festers. A blanket cradling
a damp patch of moss
left soaking in the corner of the garage,
left to be cleaned another day.
On that day a world is washed away,
and even he burns infernos.