A Poem For the Raging

The dead they are burned not by heat or cold. Their spears did not grow heavy, blooms do not sprout from their ribbed barrels. They chew now on spent bullets; they have captured themselves. In dark allies a switchblade blindness enters hearts, rage sprouts red flowers. Everything is a memory even the future. The living kill randomly, sometimes with a great kindness, a sweetness that fattens the maggot. The earth rages on. Rage buries you alive, yet you still survive. Rumi said: ‘you must dance in your own blood.' That kind of killer instinct leads you out of the fire into an oblivion that polishes eyes, makes them shine in the darkest dark. Mad man are their own wolf pack. Embrace the fang, bleed into their yawping maws. If you have a ghost in your heart make love to it In the tramp of the throng. The dead have slaughtered themselves, pity them not, they rage not, they are mad with love now, long manacled to greater lusts, passions only those beyond the horizon of themselves may see. Those who have come through are set apart as sacred scarecrows in a field of sleeping dogs. Light candles, scorch the wax until the smoke gutters into absence. Do not pray for the gone, they are all inside you now, quenching your own rage that licks and flames.