He grinned broadly from the corner
a percussive serrated smile,
cadaverous lips displaying
a rakish scarecrow style.
His emaciated figure chattered
suspended precariously from a hook;
I was completely startled
by his penetrating look.
His wink was disconcerting,
those vacant eyes held wide;
I wouldn’t call him cheeky
though he displayed a gangly pride.
One arm extended slightly
as if inviting my embrace;
it might feel a little morbid
held against that hollow face.
Gothic trends might call him charming
though his apparel seems unique,
one would only see it hanging
in a nudist colony boutique.
One dance was all he wanted
waltzing the orthopedic floor,
that physician’s skeletal dummy
I just couldn’t make myself ignore.
July 31, 2026
Skeletons Poetry Contest
Seth Pina, Sponsor
In sun and in rain,
Toils of broken soles and blistered palms.
And the journey, tedious, ends in the dank
Leaves of a breathless forest; so rancid the undergrowth,
Hissing signals of danger in the darkest foliage of mankind.
I cringed alone.
So unkempt this unholy place, where the sun is
Mocked; so ungraceful, yet so glorious.
So cautious these woods, where the panthers,
At noon, watch with the keenest of eyes, silent.
Cadaverous each leaning wood, and misleading,
Every thorny path and track . . .
I have journeyed,
And so precious my journey that I seek life among
The living, and have thus toiled until I gathered and
Garnered the speckled pages of the apothecary’s creed.
Now the leaves in the cauldron boil, squeezed!
The content stored for squirting life into the living.
apparently, an angelic apparition appeared
bedraggled beauty befuddling and beguiling Beau
crafty cadaverous creature credibly crème de la crème
deceptively decent, deferential, deliberately delicate
effortless easing efficacious etiquette and eloquence
fancied phantom fascinating fawns and fey in fairyland
Cantankerous cancers found my blood letting from the slit,
Is it avarice of me to desire the love begetting of Lazarus?
Enjoying life cadaverous like forgetting the want to live,
Is it glamorous for me to die while God desires I live?
Forgo the solid ground,
My feet dangled off the edge of a jagged cliff.
I fought the howl of squalid sin,
I caught the wind sending back the fire of my padded spliff.
Below I spotted a town,
My feet angled to squish what I saw down to the earth’s crusty skin.
Got calls asking where I’ve been.
Like,
“Just,
Just been wondering.”
Yeah yeah.
Yeah,
I guess you’ve just been wondering?
Could’ve made it better before I made it end,
Would’ve,
Should’ve,
But I wouldn’t have liked to make amends.
A couple foot of rope set up to further suspend,
Just to be an easy way out for whoever he is?
I misunderstood a friend on what is perpetuity,
I just want to live forever,
Instead I pretend to breathe on incongruity.
And as I descend upon,
I felt alive again when I grew dizzy.
I felt alive,
In my life,
I felt alive as I grew dizzy.
We were taking our Halloween bounty down the River Jinx.
Past rotting corpses, ghoul’s eyeballs and smelly scroungy mink
Why is it always so messy after Halloween, asked one of our mates.
I don’t care, I replied, the trick-or-treating and rotting pumpkins are great.
We have to get rid of the candy wrappers, the pop cans and such.
It’s a lot of work, but it is appreciated by the snowy winds, very much.
They want the world to be fresh and ready for spring after the melt.
I held my nose as we travelled past a beaver’s cadaverous pelt.
A grave wherein my body lie,
Pounds of flesh overwhelmed with flies.
In buzzes they siren their movement hence,
Though I lay still in cadaverous silence.
Flesh dehydrates, cast naked in sunlight,
On I shrivel with skin pulled tight
Where hair once soft now turn to straw,
And eyes once wet now turned bloody raw.
Electrons once fired lie dormant in slumber,
As above storms a ravenous thunder,
Whence heaven grants its long-awaited rapture,
Where hell awaits some to capture
Those fated to a demise in dust,
Thereon no longer in faith they’ll trust.
In the dark recessions of the corpse canals,
Where the breaking of bones sounds the eerie air like the clanking of bells,
Where the tearing of tendons whistle and hiss,
Echoing across blood water lakes laced with piss.
Found deep within a Carcass Catacomb, where the restless undead candidly roam,
There are, unfortunately, the unlucky few who call this home.
Sunken cadaverous corpses sink restlessly, forever seeking to escape and flee,
If not entrapped within an infernal sea, suffering in blindness with naught to see.
There! Deep below swim the loathsome drowned, cursed to breathe the contagions of innumerable ilk whilst eerily unfound.
And so to the canals are they forever bound, with rotting bones whiter than milk,
flowing in a surrendering of flesh, bleached flags of corpse silk.
Behold & beware…
green comet
sails through
cadaverous darkness
on its journey through
Sol’s neighborhood
Gaia’s parasites
blink at
the luminous
icy rock
(they are
pummeled by
shocking storms
& plagued with stormy
delusions)
It’s official:
humankind is
on the glowing rocks
(obviously a major malfunction)
dodging more shoes
dropping like conspiring flies
out of a corrosive sky
caught between interstellar cigars
& hard places
as the gods play dice
with entangled eons
Aargh & Yikes!
rumbles a horrified poet
seeking & evading
The Good, The Bad &
The Ultimate
in celestial entrails
within fields of nightmares
blindsided by
diseased deities
bearing apocalyptic gifts
blinded by
tormenting tardigrades
waiting for the last laugh
Indeed
it is exhausting
to escape event horizons
& evade Martian ironists
posing as poisoned
dust devils
howling coldly
growling boldy
Where No Pen has Gone Before
I/you
is/am/was
a soldier of
fortuitous (mis)fortune
a quiet
puddle
piddling in
southerly sloth
a gnarly ghost
galloping in
whirling ~ twirling ~ swirling
electronic sandstorms
!---)))>>>--->>>)))---!
adrift in tortured time
submerged in
the timeless slime of
gaslit dumpster fires
a hypersonic tsunami
of repetitive rage
revolting within & against
a cadaverous cage
light is muted
visions are mooted
delusions get uprooted?
an unfortunate creature soldiers on
!---)))hTySpUeNrAsMoInic>>>)!
A bottom land
where green is thread through
with a trailing mud.
A late fruited decay seeps and smears
these low meadow pasture.
Pot-bellied dewdrops hang,
strung upon spawny strings.
Here toadstools labor to open
upon cadaverous stems.
Tractor ruts have churned
a common lea into
sully and mire.
Waders squelch, stirring
drenched odors.
A slick grass slopes
here into oily shallows.
Beyond, the Ohio river shimmers bright
as it swiftly flows onward
delivering journeys
taken between moon and sun.
If you stand here splay-footed
and boot rooted,
you may catch a Great Blue Heron,
ascending,
its wings catching fire
within first shafts of golden light.
An illumination of a destination
reached by this marshy dock
of backwater day-peep.
Early Earth thaw
First gasp of breath
Heaves its snow chest
Like a blanket pulled back
Arches its cadaverous humps
A surfacing serpent
Along the street curbs
Slithers to the drains
Snakes away through the pipes
Spills over the dams
Swims in the rivers
Toils to seas
Butterflies as rain
Tombstone wave
Ten thousand miles away
Taps the cedar of a clipper ship
Once a snowflake
In this winter land
Marking a grave
In a frozen drift
Outside my kitchen window.
Ice on my igloo
roads frosted over
Cursed, cutting cadaverous cold
deathly chill from Calais to Dover
Thought it was nippy
but my fingers are numb
Arctic algidity all around
winds whistle, envelop my town
Why must we endure
gelid, glacial Siberian air
Is warmth only comprehended
when to harrowing cold it's compared
They impregnate both water and soil
with their surrendering
as we do.
After the wilt
cadaverous blooms rattle their bones,
the desiccation a scaffolding,
the skeletal hollows a refrain
of a beauty more everlasting.
The wilting but a pouring prologue
to that last stand.
Sunlight feeds them
sunlight eats them,
shadows dream them
unto death, but it is a death
more beautiful than the sunlight
or any shade,
and when the dark green sludge comes
the reek is not of them,
but of our idea of life & death.
In that last silent exposure
the dead offer up their perfection
uncaring of any discerning eye.
I know you.
I've always known you.
You're with me unfailingly.
You go where I go, an endless cycle.
A carousel at a fair, you are.
But you don't play fair.
You are a virus, a cadaverous plaque.
You attach yourself to me and wait until I am alone to slink yourself into my veins.
I live and breathe you, like poisonous gas.
I can feel you in the corner of the dark, blank room.
Waiting for a smile to appear on my face, so you can force it into a frown and paralyze my thoughts.
Hovering, watching, and waiting for me to pour onto the floor, so you can pretend to help pick me back up.
I am suffocating in you.
I can't breathe the clean air I use to breathe anymore
I'm chained to my inevitable grieve, and you have the key.
But I am too weak to fight back to you.
So I will wait until you, my dearest friend, feel like the damage is done.
My friend, Depression.
Memories Faded
Stories, Dreams, Truths- All Erased
Cadaverous World
Sub Categories
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