****** castanets -
Floors sprinkled with shrapnel
Under the dancer's skirt -
A broken guitar
Holding a flaccid hand
Midstrum
In it's hollow mouth -
Scattered sheets of unedited poems
Stained with spattered flecks of brain -
Broken bottles
In puddles of Chartreuse and Campari
Congealing onto corpses
Slouching at the bar -
Jackboots kicking the viscera from their path -
Searching for a poet's mortal coil
So it can be shuffled
Into the pyre of ideologues and deviants
Protecting the oppression of this fleeting order.