Death Rattle
Poetry is dead… Again
--
Death Rattle
The poets seem stuck
in the posture of a shrug
as the coroners huddle nearby
shuffling papers, smoking,
the cuffs of their white jackets
stained dark with blood
of this great prolonged autopsy.
They’ve again declared
that Poetry is dead.
Its corpse lays splayed
on a stainless steel table,
stanzas and similes collected
and stored in reflective trays,
glass jars fragrant with formaldehyde.
What they can’t understand
is how the body keeps breathing,
the room filled and saturated
with the sounds
of its exasperated sighs,
the almost musical notation of
pretense within repetition.
There is no heartbeat after all.
That organ long since removed,
being roughly the size
of a rusty red wheelbarrow
left too long in the rain,
and yet, somehow,
a hint of warmth remains
in the flesh, and in the voice
whispering beneath the breath,
the ghost barely haunting
this grim setting, this light bulb buzzing
somewhere out of sight
like an incessant fly
caught between the curtains and the glass
of a window most have forgotten
was ever in their home.
