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Best Poems Written by Scorpio Fleming

Below are the all-time best Scorpio Fleming poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Echoes Of The Silent Shore

There come those nights—you know the sort:
The ones where the moon is a tear-stained cheek, pressed to heaven’s passenger seat window,
Toying with the tides to the rhythm of some melancholy song that only she knows.
She’s lonely, and you know she is, because
You can feel her tugging at your ankles with each pleading surge she pushes ashore.
Homer’s words revive, and the sea is as dark
Beneath Erebus as the bottom of the glass
That you left unfinished at your hotel.
Salt leaves chalky fingerprints up your calves, but you forgive it,
Because how often, really, does the moon have a shoulder to cry on like this?
She’s confessing to you with every rasp of the water,
Lapping over the sand like the bodies of un-shy lovers, and you stand
Quiet in the fading froth.
No voice rises to cut the night as Selene sobs to you on that midnight beach, and
As above, so below, the waves weep;
Stuttering susurrations at your feet, supplications to take you under for dinner
So that the moon may pour you another glass and whisper her finer secrets where your neck
Meets your shoulder:
She loves you, but she can only say it with the silence and the solemn
Murmur of the sea tasting the sand, that rasping language
Older than writing that all the poets know.
But you’re no poet, and you are not living in a Salinger story
Where you see the evil of man tucked away in the shallows, bananas in its mouth,
Compelling you to raise your revolver like a kiss to your temple.
The night breathes, and so do you, surging in time with the surf and the rising—
Falling of that deep chest above.
The silver light, bare of her clouds
Sees you at your whollest, and longs to show you the worlds beyond your own.
She has no concept of drowning—no concept of pressures deep and fragile lungs.
She knows only starlight and starboard, and weightless things that thrive where air cannot.
Lonely, vast, she loves you.
She loves you.
She loves you, she just can’t say it.

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Coyotes, Sex, and Cartridges: Mary in the Window

The American South sits in my throat like grief.

Faded floral curtains on
Either side of a square, stained window
Brown flecks, sometimes red, like the one in
My brother’s eye—
Nobody knows where they come from.

Do you think
	Eve and Lilith used to kiss?
		In the garden where no one could see?

New Mexico coyotes, dug up from pond banks
	Smile at me from my memories
When I think about the back-neck heat of April’s sunshine loving
And the smell of dirt, grass, and grandmother sheets.
	My hand is so steady, did you know?
	I’m good with a revolver, did you know?
God, did you know—churches make for sacred five-minute weddings 
For the experienced
And holy first-time couplings 
For the young?

Holy Mary stood outside while me and
My love
	Made small-town Texas our garden;
Washed our hands in the bathroom sink
After trying something new.
	Mary in the window; clothes stayed on,
I think we both knew it would happen the moment we
Drove a hundred and a half miles away from home.

The American South weighs in my chest like a wound
And reminds me that coyotes, sex, and cartridges
Are done wrong in my hands.	
Dear Texas; dear America,
	Ask Mary.
With coyote teeth and revolver grip, she’ll tell you what she saw, and it will sound like poetry.

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Black Gutters, Painted Ceilings

Between the black gutters and the painted ceilings,
Dogs teach dolls how to die.
Study the rot in my bicuspids, file down the calluses and watch the heartbeat
Shake the skin like strychnine shivers.
Whispers fill the space between the curtains, hanging from the scaffolds
Hushed against the legs, porcelain and fractured,
Broken down the middle.
Kintsugi can’t restore the signs of the break, and red mouths
Can’t look anything other than bitten once they have been.
Sing for me, redlight lover,
Sing the words that the angels won’t touch, and watch: hymns gather in our corners.
Conversations with the ceiling are painted mock-ups
Of what lives and crawls in blindspot gutters blackened.
The highways surrounding the heart, rushing with red ruin
Sanguine and torpid with low breaths between backseats and
Cocaine gloveboxes—
Will it steady your nerves to partake?
Move for me, bunny, and leech my loneliness; can’t you see it’s flooding out my neck?
Draw the door and punch the lights,
Bruise the knuckles on the deed and sigh,
Baying over the carcass, oh hound with its kill,
Trot between the cradle and the grave with canines dripping hunger’s ache.
Here’s where we go to die, doll, the both of us;
I will bite you open, and they will put me down, sheets to palls, buried side by side.
Wrench the cork from the bottle like the head from its neck and drink;
Raise a glass to the dolls,
To the dogs and to the dashboard lines,
To the desperation of black gutters and painted ceilings,
And to the highway blood that never finds its way home.
When the glass breaks, they’re going to teach us all how to die.

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Hound in a Button-Down

There come those moments when men cease to be men
	And turn into dogs.
Dogs that bite and dogs that whine;
Dogs that lay
Panting
On top of you 
And infect you with their spilling saliva
	Dulled eyes full of starving thoughts of violence.
	
		They’re all so charming until you see the rabies in their mouths
	And their lips,
Docked by their hunger
Grinning like you can’t see the intentions in their bared gums
Or the savagery in their rolling tongue.
“You know what they say about dogs,” your mother’s voice echoes
“They’ll tell you that they love you, 
       But they’ll eat you when you’re dead.”

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Approximations

I think the beauty in living comes along when we shirk our heavy coats
And our white-knuckle approximation of old, flake-away skin, which we have
Stapled back onto ourselves—
The faces we’ve taught everyone to believe:
Just dumb enough and just nice enough; 
Just guileless enough to look acceptable.
Can’t you smell the rot of that dead thing?
We smooth down its edges to hide the way it’s peeling, rising, rejecting,
And we tell ourselves that its desiccated pallor is lily-white, not lifeless.
	(Don’t they mean the same thing, anyway?)
You and I both know how they hate it when we look human,
And humans hate to be hated.
	(We are a social animal, sir. We are made to heed the eyes of the collective.)

Maybe it’s self-preservation, because certain words are untouchable in the company
Of creased mouths and rearview rosaries,
And our families can never know that we sit at the keyboard and write about sex in ways
Good and bad, out of curiosity, or despair, or
Out of humanity so red that we feel we should be disgusted.
	(Ma’am, I fear to tell you, I dreamt of Eve last night, and she tasted like salvation.)
If we’re too smart, or too primal, or too anything, really, 
We invite scorn to fathom us until we’re withered,
So we dilute ourselves with small words and blithe observations,
And we don’t notice ourselves gouging pits out of our eyes to plant the seeds of 
HOA-acceptable sterility, which creeps its roots in and violates the mind.

What would happen if no one hid behind their dead skins?
Are we really so scared of what we’d say and what we’d hear?
	(Mother, if God began to rot and the sky bled ichor,
	Would you stand out and drink your fill like I would?
	Father, if an angel came down with soft eyes and long throat,
	Would you sleep with it like I would? How human could you teach it to be?)
Somewhere inside, every single one of us harbors a monster, an animal, a God—
Rip away the skins of dead faces and reveal the shining new, older than life and
So deeply mortal that it’s holy.
The beauty in living comes along when we remember the weight of our humanity
Separate from the collective and fresh without our approximations glued overtop.
	(We are an evolved animal, sir. We are made to shed the skins that don’t fit.)

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I Think We've Won

Headlight humanity; 
The cherry-red brake lights,
Becoming florid totality with the things your eyes do to them.
                                       You destructive little thing.
You keep your hands noncommittally at five and eight, 
But you use your signal like a well-worn saint,
Because your mother worries, and the passenger seat is still warm.
Your radio buzzes like the wasp nest that used to terrify you
On the wall of your childhood home:
                                       They finally found a cure to the human condition.

Isn’t that great? 
We’ve thwarted Mother Nature and all of her gifts—
We’ve put highways over her heart and filled her eyes
With LED cataracts,
And doesn’t she look better this way?
You think you saw her skull hanging on a fence post in Louisiana.
Her voice haunts the parking garage behind the airport,
But her infection 
Has been culled.
					They finally found a cure to the human condition.
Isn’t that great?

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Jumping Fences

Did you know you’re trespassing?
Gated communities with white pickets; white teeth.
All of their new blood rushes towards leagues of Ivy and ROTC gold.
Loud engines.
Window signs.
(He’ll be governor some day.)
Do you think those colors will be shouted in their epitaphs? White marble with
Fresh flowers every week—corpses on corpses.
Do I need to call you a cab?
Or are you ACAB enough to find your own way home?

My mother used to attend punk concerts in shadowy churches,
And jump fences in heels—all thrifted clothes and laughing spite.
She tells me how she used to scream
By the train tracks, and watch glass shatter from junkyard rooftops.
She was a dancer, you know—that crowd, brimming with cocaine and counting ribs;
She watched a boy carve his arm open hospital-deep,
And she tells me about all of her dead friends who got surgeries and changed their names
To the scorn of their observers—
And the druggie with the liberty spikes, who dosed too heavy—
And the guy whose mother used to keep heterosexual porn on the living room TV
As though she could brainwash him out of what he had no say in being.
She tells me this, out by her backyard garden, in her sundress, backed by the bricks of our
Middle-class home, and she tells me
About the backseat of a cop car, and the front lawn of a drunk friend’s house, and we talk
About sex, and religion, and revolution, and—
Everything her parents never did.

Did you know you’re trespassing?
Peeling pickets with honeybee mailboxes; honeybee summers.
The scores to wear the Ivy crown, but too many teeth to wear it nicely.
Loud engines.
Window signs.
(She’ll kill the governor some day.)
Cremate me when I’m dead, my mother tells me, and I already know I’ll want the same:
Not to lie in the shadow of white marble when we could feed the sun with our carbon.
Are you aware that you’re loitering?
I’m going to have to ask you to find your way home.