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Mike Markes Aug 2015
IVs and a cannulas that bind you to a bed that isn’t yours,
we are twisted-sick, playing God, if only for a moment.
Your freckled hand barred tighter around mine,
drawing my eyes to the bruises that seemingly
seep through blood-flecked gauze.
Every breath a shiver,
every shiver, a heartbeat closer
and each lungful sharper than the last.

I can feel dwindling stars so impenetrably far away,
sweltering, boundless, shaking-free as they please.
With your waning smile,
that nearly masked your anguish, we are
taking on space now, just us,
we are the atoms that make up our universe, we are
unstable and we are
collapsing and we are,
expanding and growing and we are,
bursting with what
little life
we have left.
Mike Markes Jan 2020
yes, our music drowns on the tenement rooftop
as the cicadas droned hymns dedicated to libido
from trees at piercing decibels, shedding nymph exuviae,
mourning warmth and dirt womb
flaunting stained glass wings—
i wonder, do they ever fly?

no, she says, at least not well.
she used to put them on her shoulder in summer
along streambeds before knotting them to balloons.
string-to-flesh, she’d make them fly.
like ground to sky, like up from down, was inevitable,

as fated as abandoned skin left on bark,
a skeletal leaf, rotting for dear death or death after,
moon-drunk, drunk-drunk, in elongated breaths,
we listen to their endless cries, now
the morning’s cold or maybe early afternoon.
Mike Markes Aug 2015
escaping shuddering city voices,
lights that sank my salty eyes,
searing,
long oriented by starlight,
today lost in lurid skies.

lake waves,
anxious to be heard,
violently gasping, crashing whispers,
restless,

under moonlight,
corrupted hope,
of names last sung,
long ago.

— The End —