Reverse Cowboy Hexapod Viking

Fragments of goodness and mercy glare blue,
sad for having wasted my despair. Don Juan
Quixote’s flirting at windmills again. Thunder
has no need to rehearse. Life carries cancerous
specifications. Bend the rod while it’s still hot.
The graveyard’s made from the alphabet. The fact
that the cockroaches are uneasy is cold comfort.
The tide knows I’m innocent, but it doesn’t care.
The flagellum has Gnostic overtones. I hear
my heart is shameless. A calving glacier groans
a verse. Oh new season, help me sleep less badly.
I’ll never forget the night we huffed the mildew

remover and jumped over a series of candlesticks.
Please try to look like you aren’t hiding
a tray of nightcrawlers in your smile.
Lunchmeat hunts for the nature of truth
in the back of the fridge. Yonder lies the fodder
of my cattle. No one could tell if it was the end
of the funeral. Knowledge says anything to show
besides that crust of dried blood? As with all myths,
the stains are downright creepy. Under the bed,
the pods have plans for us. In the Greyhound,
the comedian silently weeps. The seashore
tersely shreds documents relating to our origin.

 

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William Merricle lives in Lima, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Pudding, Slipstream, ZeroCity, and many other publications. His chapbooks include Heimlich The Donut [Pudding House], Grace, You Let the Screen Door Slam [Crisis Chronicles] and, most recently, Chaos Theory [NightBallet].

“Reverse Cowboy Hexapod Viking” © 2015 by William Merricle, used with permission