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newborn Dec 2021
he was crying in his hands. the tears were dripping like little gum drops. i stuck those tiny suckers into my mouth. they dispersed. it tasted like adversity or my beach house in Virginia. i miss Joanne. oh, no. these small little candies are reminding me of her. of her radiant smiles. but right now, he’s the only thing in my view. i can’t feel fear when we are locked together. locked together in the gates of a presumptuous heaven. he spoke to Michael. i spoke to Raphael. because i saw my cerulean clothes move. that’s the color of Raphael’s dreams. and Raphael told me that i shouldn’t worry my mind thinking about what could be. he said that u, Joanne, are a lost one. he also said i shouldn’t miss anyone that doesn’t miss me. what Michael told- let’s call him Jesse- he told Jesse that sobbing on the street across from an abandoned building is disappointing. he said that Jesse should cry with someone who will lick up the candy from his watery eyes. i overheard that part. and i grinned wisely. ‘he can cry with me. he can dance in the strawberry lighting of my doorway. he can shrivel up like an onion and then grow a tree the next day. he can catapult like a rocket or become a successful astronaut for n.a.s.a.
i will remember to delegate my legacy and make him squeeze it in between his loyal fingers and spitefully hug him goodbye when i know i will see him later. yes, Michael the archangel, i will make sure to sweep up his salty inquires and not let him climb over the fence to strangle the neighbor’s cat. i will moisten his dry edges and put him beside the wallpaper of my living angels.’
Michael smiled ressurantly and took my hands. I smelt the grape wine snug below his tapestry tongue; i knew God wasn’t too far away. but i didn’t want to be a bother. and both archangels flew us back to muffin earth where both Jesse and i sat in silence cause we had just been talking for hours and coming up with fantastical stories about the archangels. oh, find you a person who will be delusional with ur illusions and drink cranberry cider combined with vinegar and say that it tastes “nutritional.”
This is just a little short story
To no one in particular.
I wanna feel this type of love with someone
Someone who I can talk to at any part of the day about anything

(It’s also not that good lol)
Stanley Wilkin Jul 2017
In this contorted frame, badger-like scurrying,
Scrabbling for prey, in the midst of fratricidal disputes-
The dead lingering like ruptured sores-
The dead dripping like candy from Christmas trees,
Our lives meandering, our thoughts remain.

In this dry season drunken men walk like dragons
Scales roaring with white flame:
Fangs like industrial weapons
Formed into one ghastly metaphor, belching shells from darkened trenches
Beating out wafer-thin souls in Basra.
Here Hell soared like a Heaven of scimitars and virgins; angry youths
In Tennessee praying savagely to a dead god-
Lost limbs their accumulated homage
Laid on the altars with terrifying grief.

In the deserts the sun sinks more rapidly, or appears to,
In the deserts wars leave permanent evidence,
Carbonised debris, skeletonised trucks, gutted tanks with flaring giblets;
In the deserts wars are rarely tidied away.
The only thing to rot is flesh.


  2

The street in which they live is regularly cleaned,
Dustbins are emptied once a week. No one there
Hears the rumbling in the basements,
The cold sound of torture puncturing existence,
The fleeting sound of knives sharpening on blunt throats,
Children laughing in back gardens
Bullets whistling through winter weather,
The incoherent dragon feasting on rats.

The postman never calls. He gave up this route
A year ago, fed up of walking in shadows
Dripping with slime. Now, the doorbells chime,
But no one is there.
No one answers.


Tuesday morning an archangel called. No one was home.
He left a card waggling his wings
In frustration. Oh, how the archangel missed god,
Dumped here among the heathen
In an urban utopia-wanting so much to die.
The beatitudes of heaven, of choirs, of clouds, of shame,
Closed to him for infinity,
God rapping his pure finger-tips on celestial glass coloured
Green and blue, resembling his third best creation.

The archangel, like all his kind, had grown bored
And had taken to drugs
To alleviate the perpetual drone of eternity,
Committing genocide occasionally to relieve his despair,
Seducing women when that paled
Creating new religions, once every five hundred years,
When feeling particularly wicked.

Like god, he did not know how to die.



Around god’s head the angels flew
Searching for nits.  Swatting them with his
Infinite, multi-coloured hand
They flew through the darkening universe
Smashed through the earth,
Ending up at the nuclear core searching endlessly for Hell,
While their ominous creator
Smiled. They’d never clocked his humour
After a billion years. Everything he did,
He did in jest.

— The End —