GOOD LUCK TO WHOEVER FINDS MY BODY

Issue 16

Remembering shows no mercy
now I am on my own
and looking back dark and crimson
through the brain’s decaying thoughts,
caught up in dead conversations
with emaciated faces in a photograph,
master of a boyhood home
that’s rotting at the foundations,
sensibilities hacked to pieces
by misery’s inevitable wrecking ball,
I half-faint
into an empty chair,
unknown to anyone living,
amid echoes like the screams
of unnamed victims,
a total collapse of lifetimes
into this one I struggle to lead,
a child of the terror inflicted on me
and the horror I wreaked on others.
bolted into my own desolation,
pock-marked by blood and teardrops,
with a monster’s half-eaten profile,
in a plague-ridden dilapidated parlor,
at the pit of midnight
in the battered bawdy-house of coming death.

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John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, White Wall Review and Flights.

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