By JB Mulligan
The flat and pallid path to all horizons
narrows to the domed demise
of an ashen, ill-lit sky.
Light breaks through the drear overhead
sometimes (enough to remember, anyway),
and stains the jagged dirt
(that once the sky was washed, translucent,
the distant rim aglitter
in a swirl toward the center).
A small, round, extinguishing pupil
reflected in an oily puddle
looks upon itself extinguish
above and in the center of
a bland landscape
broken by scattered clumps
of spiked, decorative flowers
and mounds of bones, worn
like sand-whipped stone.
It widens, as astonished
by its overripened emptiness
in image and self,
a loathing Narcissus
bereft of petals and roots;
then blinks in spasms of uneasy sleep.
Wind stumbles, cursing and gasping,
haunted ghost of a painted past.
An imaginary hermit
flagellates lazily, feeling the slow
moist trickle down his back
like rain from a warmer time.
Each drop thuds to earth.
It is a music.
Category: Poetry, SNHU Creative Writing, SNHU online creative writing