Best Necrotic Poems
Above, the shrill of neon lights portend
a promise of new love in garish hues,
but for a broken life yet on the mend
the darkness of the scape brings only views
of solitude when memory accrues
as strangers unimpassioned eyes peruse.
The music wafts from grottoes down below,
blue jazz and candles in a shadowed room,
while up here floodlights cast necrotic glow
as wind gusts and the drops of rain resume.
Cold luminance is all that they exhume
just as my mind expects a rose to bloom.
Your recent death keeps looping in my mind,
no passing faces in the crowd are yours.
I walk the night, imagine you in kind
emerging through the uninviting doors
like Cathy to go dancing on the moors.
I rush beneath an eave as now it pours,
your white reflection standing in the rain,
come back to haunt the neon night again.
1/23/18
People from all nations running for Their Lives, Pursued by Hamas.
That day 1,200 were slaughtered.
International hostages died! Few live ones do remain.
I do not even know what day this is!
Nor month, or even, what year!
For I live each day within a clock.
Whose only sound ticks away endless,fear!
I have no mirror to see my young face,
Just locked in a room by mad barbarians,
Absent are they, of a trace of the human race .
My family, all my friends, taken from my life..
My treatment, hardly an ounce, humanitarian!
I assume I am probably still, just twenty four..
I was dragged in bloody violence from the “Nova
Concert for Peace” dance floor!
By inhumane, brutish men, who dragged me across
my country’s fertile fieds!
They hit and assaulted me, in a car because I fought,
and no, I would not yield!
I heard the screams of death, the gunshots, unbearable!
I hear them still, they shake the memories, so potent!
that the necrotic plant in my window sill, sways.!
No sun, no blue sky, do I see, not one friend to hug me?
Window boarded up, and slices of bread a day …are three!
Animals, so-called men, blindfold me, and use me for their
everyday, multiple times, I weep!
They try to make me cry each day, while I try to sleep.
But being an Israeli woman, a Sabra, with a strong will!
This in one pleasure they steal, u do my best, may they not fulfill!
I can only dream that your own country backs Israel!
I beg you to hear my voice, to please pray for me!
You have the free voice to back my country, to set me free.
I am a prisoner, a hostage, with no family, friends or choice.
Can you~yes, you~honor my Jewish voice?
Shalom~
Israeli hostage in Gaza
Eh, Bebe ...
clueless you with the wide eyes open,
which can’t see
So apoplectic of heart,
paralyzed by the cobra sway
of changeling channel charmer words
Gen Z baby gloomer
remote diaphragm controlled,
go back to analog sleep
Oh oh ... video comatose —
Nightmares begat by daydreams
of reel digital silver screams
Lost Vegas patch-eye vision
of one arm pulled down
And the coins keep trickling
into your open palms
Baby Bebe gon umbilical vault cray cray
Cut the cord of the eyelid dark violet curtains ...
bling-bling blind birth
shut the womb of twin retinal glow dearth
So aorta slow,
slug cranial coma critical ...
lobotomy comatose
Virtual voices say:
eh, Bebe —
Pull the plug ... let the dying vapors go,
expired from a necrotic nasal
Black butterflies flutter through the courtyard carelessly,
their folly flitting through variegated foliage, creating
worlds so breathtaking so as to not be real, just as
imperial belladonna bows in reverence to Mother,
thankful for the necrotic nectar that will soon
be on their dying breath
Black butterflies drink turtle's tears to race streetlights
past yellow tape, the words that read "Do Not Cross"
a foreign language for anthromorphs with velvet eyes
on their back, giving insider views, behind the lines
declining the advances of bluebonnets, fixated
on Iris's crescent wings
Black butterflies are sticklers about their traditions,
many may even call them creatures of habit, but
they progressed their ideas about chrysalises
after watching their cousins crawling out of
cocoons, knowing there's no better way to
live than in spun silk
A PART OF HISTORY
Our failures in cities burn-forget-
Our failures haunt us-biting heels
We choked rictus stun their neon
We are awaiting instructions-but-
His masked beings see us but do not touch us
They can not protect us day by day our failures
Frenzied adjusting the struggles to not overdoing
I see no valid interlocutors in our failures
unsustainable and necrotic inside
dolls and stumps but only weak
Crawling and scratching kevlar window separating us from living
I never overcame your departure brothers
since then
my feet walk crippled
the kidney only filters half of the residues
my heart partially collapsed
and beats insufficiently
the gastric juice became acid
and corrodes the sweetness of dreams
the bronchial airways are carbonized
and emit a roaring echo
the neurons lost
innumerable synapses
when dying necrotic
but here I am with my soul
regenerating light
so that the guide with the candle
calms my rumble of jungle
We are one. We are the same. We are I.
We move with the same ligaments, the same joints, the same muscle strings.
We ooze of acid. We erode. We exude a putrid odour.
We are a walking culmination of demons.
Barbatos’ head, sticking out of our body’s hip, screams for help.
His shoulders aches from the angle it’s stuck in.
Yet when people go near him to lift the pressure off his melted body,
He bites their hands off and leaves them with a mark of the necrotic.
Morax is at the top, craning his long, spindly neck.
He, like Barbatos, snaps at anyone who dares go near me. Us. Them.
He harms himself, sometimes. Calls it punishment. I - we - they - think they are addicted to the pain.
It’s all he has to forget the ongoing war between all the demons struggling to take control over our body.
Beelzebub calls out my name. Our name. Theirs.
He, they, it - it whispers. It ignites the oil that covers our body.
I weep tears of tar — bitter and sticky. It only contributes to the roaring wildfire.
I, cages inside it all, can only watch as everything I love turns to ash.
Everything we touch melts from our acidic hands.
Hands, we have several. Some fall off and skitter away, rippling our effect on the land.
Our footsteps turn the ground beneath us to mush. Our movements are slow and sluggish.
It is only when we ignite, we begin to run. We, I, They - light each tree top, each wooden wall, each patch of grass - until our lungs blacken from the smoke.
We are choking. All four of our windpipes stretch, and stretch, and stretch
Until it stops
The monster of my town is dead.
Everyone is safe, again.
Elemental dissonance
Poly-plated string guess
Depressive spine edge
Identity description cubed
Waterfalls negative score
Abyssal language drops
Hole numeral planification
Horizontal ship oval dust
Sea’s sloped gravitational
Octagon growth
Lack of facts and matter
Undertone course kaleidoscope
Particular perimeter blast
Empty can tomatoes
Protostar geometric syndrome
Indifferent neurotransmission
Necrotic wavelength voice
Breakfast experience lost
[Stone…stone…stone…stone…]
The succubus bleeds in the shadows of woe, I feel nothing as your eyes glaze over. Haunted you linger with a necrotic glow. I feel nothing as your flesh begins to harden. Hush child, tis time to be silent as infinity embraces you deep. Go fourth the abyss and wander the coils of fathomless oceans of sleep…
The clouds, the first at dawn, ripened, pregnant,
With sunrise, and wet, dissolved, gathered,
Evolved and became, blankets, tarred black;
Feathery rain, hammered, dropped and spat,
Cast out, of the womb, of heaven; the trident,
Electricity, crackled, white, forked the earthen
Vagina; splitting trees, their penile trunks, charred
With tongues of flame; gnarled bark, ablaze,
When from a bough, hung, fruit, the strangest
Fruit you’ve ever seen; untouched by flame, black
Just the same; noose neck crooked, sightless
Crow-pecked sockets, purple tongue torn,
Ravaged; hands hemp-bound, dripped with rain;
Carcass left to rot, decay, pendulously sway,
Morbid compass, warns others who would rise,
Speak, dare suggest, they have human rights.
Strange fruit, indeed, yet stranger still the
Bone orchard spooks, supremacists, bigots,
Who put the fruit on the bough; retards, dumb,
Blinded; nothing is achieved by ignorance,
Terrorism, superstition, stupidity – just self-fulfilling
Prophecies and a long, hard day’s dying, for those
Of such morally rank, necrotic persuasion.
By such hands, progress falters, cosmically trips,
Slips on galactic banana peel; and people, innocents,
As ever, are needlessly done to death in
The redneck night of each numbskull day.
Nomadic memories
nurtured in mind's eye as
necrotic curtains part.
Naive sanguine beliefs
nourish scrutiny 'til
novelty rendered moot.
Nirvana was falsehood.
----------------------
(C) John C Michaels, 30th April 2017
For the "Pleiades N" contest sponsored by Kim Merryman.
(3rd Place)
The Brown Recluse, its pathway goes
Past radiator’s stanchion rows
On to the corner, up the wall
Across the ceiling then to fall
Upon my bed. But no one knows.
This silent killer never slows
When seeking prey, seeing all,
No soul sparing, and few recall
The Brown Recluse!
On some its horrid bite bestows
Necrotic death that ever grows,
Consuming flesh, a spreading gall,
Oh hear and heed my urgent call!
Hunt down this pest, then fast depose
The Brown Recluse.
July 5, 2017
Rondeau form
For “Form R” contest
Sponsored by Broken Wings
Cool throngs of stars formed one vast arm to sweep
the coal-black clockface of the sky. To watch it
was to reel beneath the slow, imperious creep
of the never-ending circle. One could reach out,
it seemed, and almost touch the tart cicada song
which throbbed in soft insistent insect waves
with formlessness of drizzle, mass of stone.
But more than these, the patient ancients blazed
blackness from their gnarled necrotic trunks,
more ominously sensed than seen, and bled
into the dark those summer suns they'd drunk,
as tired as immortality, as dense as death.
We hope on heartbeats, count on slivers of light,
but hear within our blood the rhythm of night.
Blood
drips
cold
through
breathless
necrotic
lips,
au revoir.
11/09/2017
Written: August 14, 2025, for Contest Sponsored by: Anoucheka Gangabissoon
*******
I writhed in the womb of a necrotic hush,
a stygian silence where barghests lurk—
My slack-jawed soul, sodden with oblivion lull,
clanged against the obelisk of despair.
The wound, a molten mouth of aurora,
sizzled with sacred suction—
a fipple of fire, ineffable and fecund,
where pestilence pirouetted with puissance.
I danced—yes, I danced—
in the desiccation of my demise,
a gavotte of soulfulness,
My blood is a rubicund aria of rapture.
Alabaster bones bore the torque of truth,
Each fracture is a triptych of ephemera and flame.
I was a poltergeist of my former self,
grappling through the noosphere multivocal maze.
The stench of bygone hexes clung to lava rock,
But I, stalwart and sinewed with mettle.
careened past the clamor of puerile pabulum,
past the gossamer glamor of grief.
I was broken—yes—
but bold enough to resuscitate,
to regale the necromancy of my rebirth,
to supplant sorrow with the sacred sizzle of self.
Now I stand, an empyrean echo,
a veridical vestige of velvet versatility—
my heart, a burnished niche of noble hope,
My spirit resembles a smooth, celestial sunset.
Let the world scrutinize my scars,
They are not grotesque—they are garrulous.
They speak in tongues of alchemy and amaranthine ache,
a quixotic quiddity, a quintessence of comeback.