Fever’s Child and Thirty Years

FEVER’S CHILD

The world reduced to a vague presence in a dream,

a quiet, senseless and irresponsible,

while the fear is a constant hard wind in the face,

the kind that bends trees, weathers stones and strips branches.

A body temperature of forty Celsius

is a distorting mirror that stretches time

out long and thin, then short and dense,

leaving you a shipwrecked survivor

clinging on among the clutter of ordinary life

while crabs poke at your ears and nostrils;

never knowing whether your rescue took years,

or merely hours, of alternating sweat and shivers.

THIRTY YEARS

I used to think: before this day is done

it will be spoilt like all the others,

hacked by the snake whose scales are mirrors

reflecting the world back dull and twisted.

I expect it is still in there somewhere

dividing constantly like amoeba,

each a clone of the original

but always weaker and more distant;

bots talking to bots in eternity.

S.C. Flynn