Best Poems Written by Anthony Otten

The Arsenic Sunset

The Arsenic Sunset

Eden now knows what it meant
When corruption took flesh as a 
Serpent—
For all things alien
Narrow to a tendril
A twist of black sap
A rune of bloody syrup against tissue-paper tides
Winking crudely among the starved sluggish currents
Of emerald and sapphire
Like a clay-red foaming artery.
A root seeking an oasis not yet tainted
Among jeweled whitecaps and glassy heat.


Eden now knows what it meant
When the urge to ruin something
Stole form as an apple
That could be devoured into
A constellation of seeds withered on your palm;
For the ruin of anything has a stiff-grained pleasure to it—
Not much separates a grimace and a smile.


The brackish wave
And black-slick shore
Ache—
With want, with memory
For the reign of a firmament not yet singed with sulfur breath
And a sky yet unbound by the rainbow venoms
That richen the arsenic sunset.
The thrum of myriad hearts
Sounds the confusion
And the agonal forward trudge
Of a world unfertile
Bathed in alien minerals, and haunted by
The loss of its oceans’ poetry.

Copyright © Anthony Otten | Year Posted 2011