Unsure of Cell or Shore
We made our padded rooms,
Trampoline parks for a time,
For bouncing off the walls,
With a crash into the side,
Those clouds our leather breakers,
Of eroding rolling rows,
Salty tongues of the storm.
Strapped into a jacket,
A hopping biped fowl,
Once a soaring pterosaur,
The terror of the skies,
Now domesticated bird,
Trussed with wrung neck,
Head severed at the join.
Off the pier to flip,
Into the storm before the breakers,
That wave you watch but cannot stop,
Blinding the inner ear,
To an up or down, or sand or air.
A confused gulp of coral,
Shocks us into motion,
To shoot up from the bottom,
And bite the vapor breeze.
Clouds overhang again,
Dangled down to earth,
A sea of puppets bobbing,
On white lip crests of sea,
Amorphous drifting of,
Stop-motion smithereens,
Those clouds the dust of ages past,
The ash of ages gone.
How can you reanimate
A blooded life gone cold?
To look upon the slab,
Of stitched together memories,
Now lost of life and stuck together rotten,
Another modern Prometheus called.
Thrown like a bottled ship,
Lab foetus in a jar,
From crest to trough and out of rhythm,
I chew my hair, a noodle dish,
My pickled skin, burned crisp like chicharrón,
I swallow breakers rocks, this storm,
And my earthly body down,
A whole communion of my form.
What unearthly hours reign,
When light slips past the bars of my park,
That epoch between the dusk and dawn,
With blind illusion of silence,
When phantom horrors come.
Copyright ©
Alice Reynolds
|