GREEN AND YELLOW
Without those colourful floating pills you sink –
bones dropped by a chemical vulture –
to shatter on the rocks of a dead planet.
The pieces of you left intact then wander
through the ruins of lost civilisations
hung with leathery shrunken heads
before boarding a plague cruise ship
to an island of abandoned labyrinths.
After that, it’s dinner with fires all around
while cruel regrets appear like species thought extinct
and wait as snipers for the next mass killing
in this permanent opium war.
EXTRADITION
These little white pills photoshop your mind,
taking you beyond facial recognition
to where anxiety is a distant tremor,
then just a dog stirring in its sleep
and into the fog and silence
of peaceful, invisible zodiacs
where you are the only citizen:
a limpet sheltering on a rock
a trilobite calmly cruising forever
a jellyfish drifting free
a dust mite in a desert.
CLICKBAIT
The most solid thing I remember
of that day is the gleam, the honest face
of life’s dwindling. I could not keep you,
but only suffer alongside for a while
and then confront the geography of pain,
lost as a lighthouse in the sun.
Maybe I am just inventing a dream
that only a digital clone could give,
but I hope you are still really somewhere
in perfect convergent evolution.
INTROVERSION
An endless silent ceremony
before the white ashes of vanity.
Living in a world of your own words
until everything is a mirror.
The cries of a fabulous creature
hovering pitilessly overhead.
Clinging on like weeds around barbed wire
or birds nesting among spikes and syringes.
Fearing an embassy from another planet
or looters profiting from disaster.
Published in Synchronised Chaos
S.C. Flynn 