My Question For The Unabomber

 I asked the Unabomber

if he had ever been in love.

You know--before Montana--

before wandering the unforgiving winter woods

holding a frozen tulip

and a rolled-up poem

nestled inside a pipe as if you were a minstrel.

I asked him

if anyone had ever inhabited

the slow-cooking smoker

of his heart.

Was there ever the very emblem

of desirability

in the formula of anyone's eyes?

In your Harvard classes

full of second-week quitters

and callow

nattering plebes

was there never any elevated romantic

who might have solved for the

impossible equation

of your isolation and your need?

Oh Teddy, 

you coward,

you murderous nutjob,

if the one whose heart could have stopped you

were to speak at last to your wobbling soul,

could you still be fixed

even now,

or are you already damned? 

Perhaps my question itself

is like postage on a parcel

that can carry your remainder

softly out of shame

or suddenly into Hell?

_______

for Word Garden Word List--Ghost Eaters.

Music: The Fleetwoods Mister Blue

Silent Bird

There is a silent smoke-bodied bird

in a stone nest

on a broken branch

overseen by a gape-eyed imbecile.

"All hail," say purple asters.

Hollyhocks drip with faked tears.

Sunflowers babble.

In evening,

all blooms combust to ash.

A silent smoke-bodied bird 

lays dead eggs 

in a broken bell

with a millstone tongue.

Multi-mothered monsters calve.

______

for Friday 55, hosted by the haughty and magnificent Hedgewitch. ;-)

My Other Hand

They tell me--I mean the throat clearers in their white coats--
that my extra hand is a blighted twin,
and that its presence on the right side of my back is not threatening.

The fools.
Hungering for love like anyone else, I gave in
to someone's touch. In mid-declaration, he found the hand
and jumped away as if electrocuted when he saw what he'd touched.

In church, wearing my customary black,
I pray, and in my prayer, I lie, giving thanks.
The horrid hand crosses itself at the moment of deceit,
and my skin crawls so badly that I nearly scream right there in the pew.

The worst part is that I can't really see it.
I twist painfully, my back to the mirror, but it curls away 
like some unholy creature avoiding teeth, or fire.
I curse it, sobbing with frustration, the hand mirror smashed.

At night, the hand traces letters against the skin of my back,
but the language makes no sense except to devils and Gypsies.
My mother brought the doctor, then the priest, upon finding me
blood-drenched and wheezing on the floor in the morning.

Who could blame me, for the knife?
Who could forecast that the thing would defend itself,
at cost of three fingers, one of them mine?

The same doctors performed surgery that afternoon,
pronounced the thing removed and benign,
but I know better, and carry the scars to prove it.
______

for my own Fireblossom Friday challenge at Real Toads: "It's Only A Paper Moon."

 

The Tenth Month

In the tenth month,
the limits of the natural are exceeded.
Trees dissolve and what remains
too long must be expelled, debrided.

There you perch, smoking while I suffer.
Fire, Love? We burn, but as a disease.
In the tenth month, what has gathered must scatter
lest it smother, lest it freeze.

Behold what becomes
(of our union, dear, of our fucking.)
Behold the freak, the monster
the helpless nightmare of our making.

In the tenth month, you cannot fly, but seize
as your pretentious pose shits itself and dies.
And me? Your one-time ideal?
I eat shame, and vomit, when our merciless fledgling cries.
________

for Magaly's "October" prompt and for the Tuesday platform, both at The Imaginary Garden With Real Toads.