Hail! Assassin

Hail! Assassin in your golden robe,

you are farewell incarnate, cold as a stone tablet.

Your masters dole out a new Fahrenheit, warming nothing

while whispering to the Ferryman that there are no coins, only handshakes.

You are farewell incarnate, cold as a stone tablet,

a corporeal machinery producing fine dust

while whispering to the Ferryman that there are no coins, only handshakes.

You palm medicine from your keepers to those already dead.

A corporeal machinery producing fine dust

is your rubber stamp of onionskin love, a doublespeak of no return.

You palm medicine from your keepers to those already dead

as your masters cry, "Hail! Assassin, in your golden robe!"

_______

A pantoum for Skylover's word list.

This Poem Is the War Bird, the Cat, and Ashes

This poem is the war bird, tethered.
This poem is the cat, crouched, waiting.
This poem is ashes, flame's dark warmthless daughters.

Once-soft Goddesses wearing gauntlets
hurry new dawns into a red sky unready;
The bones of songbirds make trinket jewelry
for these light-drunk chippies, unsteady.
It is not the war bird who is tethered to these dime store deities--
they desperately tether their silly selves to him,
his talons,
his keen eye,
asking him in a rush, blathering,
to tell them of rising, of honest blood, of sky.

Quiet becomes rare currency
in a plaza sick with ambrosia barkers.
Weaving between pillars and the busts of noble dead,
comes a common cat, traversing the markers.
It is not the feline who lives at the edges and margins,
but the noisome voided screechers calling themselves master--
vomiting,
wearing bibs,
insensible to the common cat, crouching,
stalking the dull bird under their ribs.

Here is what we did and what we were,
here and here and here. Weep for the beauty of it,
write poems and songs and marble art,
to present to these defectives--our citizens--steeped in shit.
Everything skips a generation, so the wise ones have said,
before we cored them and tore out their tongues,
all the while
pasting on a laurel wreath.
See our favored girls, pampered and scornful,
smiling ice from rot-sweet teeth.

This poem is the war bird, tethered.
This poem is the cat, crouched, waiting.
This poem is ashes, flame's dark warmthless daughters.
_________

for Hannah's mini-challenge, "boomerang metaphors".