The Last Playground

At a graveside where rain always falls like silvery pus
I see beneath the roots
a comma,
where canines and great aunts see full stops
and other tangled grammar.
No nothing, nothing no,
the seams of Life once cast
cut deep into gritty dunes,
shifting into silent but wild anenome tufts.
And the nimble footed dance
with pretty stockinged feet for ghouls
while hornets plough the toxic wax
for happy Lazarus syrups.

An entrance and a path;
no useless marble weighted down,
achored to the soil
muffling the shrieks of slumber dolls.
No last hooray of hymn and ash
nor jellyfish withering behind pine mud ships.
These sombre asylums
are never still or miserable to the hosts
as they hang their skulls on thistle, cracked seraphims
and visiting sobbing, meatworks.
Bless ancient mornings when gutter robes
rise on misty dew,
and uninspired foals sink with the bone crew
into opium and traction...

@Steven Francis poems 2010