Spoken word without the spoken part...

Shotgun





The noise instantly settled deep within

like a fossil or a foundation.

Still, I know it -

like a scarred finger tip or

30 year old photos of a father's

hunting trip.


"Place the stock under your chin

and breathe, See?

Squeeze the trigger gently in

and kill it, it's that easy."


After 39 seconds of silence he told me we
were not his only sons.

And as he turned to me and stared
down the barrel of his gun
he said - "You never were a promise
just a working man's mistake. Maybe just
a way of beating death

from cradle to grave"


He likes his coffee strong and later on,

and his women sweet and cheap
His Guns and Ammo issues

and he liked his whiskey neat.
He spoke this to me subtly -

as soft as silk or fleece.
The way you speak of ones you meet

with brittle teeth
Quietly,

as if you're keeping

some nasty secret deep.
Deeper than the whiskey keeps

(and deepening)
buried deep within your sleep?

What a whiskey whisper holds

keeps
his sheep
from sleeping.
　

The noise settled deeper still,

it sits. I could put my thumb on it,

pin it down and, without ultrasound or bloodhound,

tell you exactly where it lay buried

in the back of my chest -Like a crucifix

or thump,
it hangs in the ether
separating my black lungs
at the dimple in my neck.

And as if a token silence is all that I have left,

the rush of air escaping becomes a blast of dying breath



Bang.

The noise has settled deep within

all the broken bones and tissues
cutting out the ventricles
dissecting the squared inches.
Marking them 1 to 4
polishing the ridges.
Stacking them like cinder-blocks, echoing a wall
But my Jericho is coming and

he comes to make them fall

Calling through a horn
with a sound so wafer thin

Coursing through me
like a thread of venom
Cutting through like violence,
screaming like a heartrace or

silent violins.




Write an ode to the wasteland

of the white-tailed flag of flesh

the hunger for some torture -

for the mercifully fresh.

"Life is war" he tells me

appearing only half his size

with one hand

he stokes the fur

while the other

gouges eyes.



"I swallow air raid sirens and

I spit them out blitzkrieg"

He's challanging to the struggle -

I'm struggling

to breathe

as blood reaches

my feet.

Slowly sinking dirt-ward

toward someone else's sky,

tapered limbs are pinned to death

like paper to a fly.


Startled, you realise
that the noise so settled deep within
Is not the sound of searing buckshot

but of your heart crashing in

and reverberating sharply
so darkly in the darkness
that the noise is now every sound;

every spinal wave;
everything,
but a shotgun blast.