Grey Eats Pink

By MJ Dally

Rat:

My consciousness,

hapless rat,

brown, big and defeated,

bounces lifeless

upon tentacles of

the ten thousand ousting forces

that invaded it’s temple.

His whimper has stopped,

but it wasn’t

a peaceful death.

Grey eats pink:

A blanket of elephant skin

as big as the sky

fell slowly unto our world;

a grey and sure eclipse,

now the supple pinks remain

only in peeking slithers

under it’s sharp margins,

in the fallen flowers

and the last charges

of fading memories.

Weeping Jesters:

I saw a painting

about 18th century acrobats,

the mother holds her dying child,

fallen, head bleeding,

upon her costumed bossom,

and cries viscous white paint tears,

as the father clown

and dogs and an owl watch on

behind the wall of a theatre;

I feel it printed

upon my mood.

Life, such a tug of war,

between the need to live

and the need to die.

Skeleton Town:

There’s a couple of highway shops

near my house, by the flyover’s tall spill;

people gather there to have tea

and a smoke;

but they are all just skeletons.

Their skins are evaporated

by what they hold invariably

in one of their palms,

they are talking,

but the conversations rise

and fall from dead mouths

into dead ears,

the hot tea drips down

a dead esophagus,

the smoke is sucked down

a dead wind pipe.

There are big and swift cars

swooshing past at two heights,

then there is the night

radiating an empty, still heat

and occasional mismatching breezes

under the yellow lights,

but I don’t feel them;

I only hear them.

The breeze is only a promise,

that eventually,

a skeleton may smile.

By MJ Dally