Missing Persons
Your only friends are online contacts,
prisoners of each other
sensing the distant trembling,
using the solution against themselves.
You create your own types of silence
as sad consequences of the afternoon,
arguing with podcast announcers
in response to signals of nothing.
Later, hope appears as a flash in the night
but finishes buried in an unmarked grave
while you try to catch the light in your hands.
Fear is a sick dog in a basement
stoking isolation so intense
that it burns you for the rest of your life.
4AM in Infrared
The thermal caress of daylight has left you
eager for the night and its lonely voyage.
In this dark there are no kings, no leaders,
and all the unreliable narrators–
the black flower of civilisation
and its wilting pretence of justice–
are just bat skeletons in a cupboard.
Speech is a torn net through which thought escapes,
but the silent mind is a starless sky
where a meteor glides and then is gone;
the universe frozen to a solid ball
of crystal held tightly for a moment
while emptiness’s ghost turns and re-turns
the fears and powdered ashes of generations.
Published in New Feathers anthology
S.C. Flynn 