Crispy Fried Chicken
A thunderstorm beating against my ribs,
The sun glares into my eyes and screams –
Wordless terror; as claws, a monster’s dibs
Snatch her from the coop. ‘Take me!’ I weep.
‘Tsk tsk – too old. It’s a party!
I’ll need tender meat.’
Stench of sweat, rotting flesh
Or minds, festering in metallic confines,
Crumbling feathers, dying babes
Snatched by demon hands from damnation’s cage.
Wings torn, breast ripped – she was mine!
‘Crispy wings, stuffed breast’, they wink and smile.
Crimson hands feed crimson eyes
From the dinner plate of corpses;
Beat my wings, scratch my feet
As he too is torn and twisted.
That makes two; two gone four to go
Of the little ones I tended.
Their crimson blood must’ve reached the skies,
For it’s bathed in burning red;
The demon’s hand darts in again
Into our cursed little shed.
A wordless cry, twist, rip; the bloody flaps of dying wings
Into the butcher’s knife, I fly; one final remonstrance.
A Shrine to Pointless Things
In my corner of the flat, I’ll build
A shrine to pointless things;
To broken pens and chequered notes,
Old stamps forgotten in the bins.
To rusty screws, empty batteries,
A shrine to battered memories
Of lives lived as in a dream.
Oh let me but a corner, to build my empty shrine,
To a broken bangle, martyred in her prime –
Not to love, nor war: but the pointless drudgeries of life.
We fight for no grand causes; we build for no great men,
Our highest aspirations – food, shelter and a peg;
Our shrines all shorn of glory,
To discarded dreams, a testament.
So in my corner of the flat, I’ll build
A shrine to trivial things;
To plastic flowers, dog-eared journals
A homage to mundanity.
The world glories in grand things –
Great passions of love and war;
My words, hence, are for all trivial things
By obscure smiles and tears marked.
