Time here is measured
by the lint-clogged resurrections
of air-conditioners.
All of us have had to learn
to shout past our souls.
Dulled minds are churned awake.
Fractured nights slumber on
beneath the rocky rumble
of nearby ice-machines.
The ‘Marigold’
is unmarried, divorced and abandoned,
but for those still not seeking lonely
there are midnight do-overs.
Behind the days horizon
a desert sky still thirsts
in the mouths of discarded shoes.
Firey sunsets melt
a stale residue of bedside booze.
The Marigold is mad, it was built that way,
its identical rows of doors
are designed to be portals
to yet more distant parking lots.
We internees prefer our rooms
to be dead to the daylight,
though every night
they will always revert
to storage units
for long imagined - much better times.
Musicians played classics as condemned marched under “ARBEIT MACHT FREI.”
Losing their “SOLES” and “SOULS” the future options for each gassee!
For every pair of empty leather “SOLES” you see,
they took a lovely “SOUL” away from you and me.
They also took their hair, gold teeth and skin,
piled them all up, then started over again.
Experimentation without permission gave modern medicine lots of cash,
the line perpetually kept moving with dogs, guns and the heavy lash.
Imagine screams coming from showers that NO ONE cared to hear,
“ZYKLON B” poured in from above, the dead dragged out the rear.
Even today there are those that say it never, ever evolved,
though a despot once told the world, it was a “problem he solved!”
We’ve all seen the pictures, that wasn’t a vacation passenger train,
Muster “LEATHER VOICES,” whose SOULS cry out “NEVER AGAIN!!!”
*”arbeit macht frei,” (work will set you free). The internees had to march under that
infamous sign upon arrival at Auschwitz. Poem for Leather Voices contest.
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