Cow Skull Synagogue

Time ~
stripped away by tearaways
and falcons,
left bald and boneless
in the lap of eternity.
Grieving buckleheads
fold in cirrhosed shells
like fingers of a god
knuckle deep in bloodied salt.

Love is the guts
to this world,
and we pickled minnows
content in artery tins,
bloated by plastic
and hysteria,
we dive under psychotic herons
in search of loot and song.
Never to feel the lick of hades
on our dandy spines.

Tender years
cruel years,
drawing the unsuspecting
to their graves.
Pulling fangs inward
to the strange, endless gullet
of the bone citadel,
where air will leave our mossy lips
like sour milk,
every path leads to stone...

@ Steven Francis poems 2011

Me To Me and I

Two balls with a salamander's eye,
one pinched like a septic scab
the other mourned in a Trappist sty.

Prayers scraped from an honest stone,
sincere words on target
aimed at dry, decieving bones.

Lusty arias on a veiny shelf,
stabbing fishnet willows
milking the swollen self.

Casket cases in sober lines,
through iced temptations
over darkened miles.

Figure hang from trident pole,
scattering fish and ogres
into hollow holes...

@Steven Francis poems 2011

Sometimes I Forget

The scars of the world
are often too much
that sometimes I forget to breathe.
Forget to watch
the kingfisher sunrises
forget my eyes to see.

Forget to breathe
the eyeless air
and pierce new age with thorn.
To tear my sight
from murderous hoardes
and live like the water born.

@ Steven Francis poems 2011

Crepe Idols Beneath the Limpet Lights

I would wager a fistful of cockles and another of laverbread
that tuneless hornets play for you as you sleep in your seabird valley.
All stitchep up like nests of comatose dolls
as want-to-be vagrant children in pelican poses
wail into your stone ears about hawks and snakes
and uglier things in dens.
Braying with their cannisters and chalk
like their life's breath now matched yours in death...

@ Steven Francis poems 2011