Nothing but Annihilation

Over the summer, Sophie encouraged me to try a writing exercise of typing free-association images for a given number of minutes each day, and then putting them away unread to be used for a poem later on. I forgot all about them with the advent of school, and found them today while going through my boxes and files during the process of moving. I immediately had to write a poem, which I realized I haven't done in at least a year now.


Nothing but Annihilation

A dark wolf stalks the forest of tin cans and wire,
Slouching over the guardrail and wood-grain of the night.
A solemn golem hunting the hawk-winged angel; Poisoned
Primroses pinned to his suit jacket, shotgun slung over one clay shoulder,
His howls darkling the streetlamps in this tar-pool rain.
Leopard skin bankbook glistening with the fat sweat of his pleated palms,
His tie a hangman’s noose, a serpent woven from liquid gold and ashes
Poised for flight on an arrow of wooden slats and silver dollars.
The lions of greed drink from these dark labyrinths of blood and roses,
An abyss of birds and buildings, clocks falling into the river.
A small dog in a trashcan sinking into the night’s warmth, trailing
The riverbed sewn with hatchets and revolvers, buttons and petrified sinew.
Language is a body dying in the window of the beast called mouth,
Tongues of flame and honey, a shoe forgotten in the gutter’s memory.

She sleeps on a bed of crushed velvet and scavenged newspapers,
A ladder made of bones, the morbid sacrality of moist lungs and halos.
The angel’s thigh, draped in white garments stained a pale rose.
She dreams of dollar-fled fields and pounds of corpulent text,
A child’s face of pure joy, illuminated by the subtlest matrices,
A destroyer of time as her hair sweeps the prismatic streets clean.
Stars fall bleeding to the pavement, crying softly at night to go home,
Small lightning bugs of molten metal and mutilated machinery
Dance like jeweled scarves and cinnamon sticks under the half-eaten moon,
Beneath the weight of a thousand plastic worlds twirling on tilted poles.
The beast weeps at his own reflection, falters the gun into the wasteland,
The sky askew and smoke smiting the city with razor-wire clouds,
He weeps alone, binding the hours till sunrise, presents for a time
When the whole feathered mechanism bursts into flames and hosannas.