The Day Before Gone
It was the day before gone.
The strophe began on
The strophe began on
a sun weak with fever,
a sky of grey primer
because plague hit the painters
before they managed the blue.
The tepid air was fragrant with
malfeasance, but the dumbshow
never paused.
It was noon on the sea of shadows.
All through the potential zeros
bug-scudding over the whine-
dark waves ran a shiver, a dread,
the sodden fog of the sailor
at the rocks too busy with rum
and scrimshaw to have bothered
with learning to swim.
The sirens and the kraken laughed
in antiphons, tatting the antistrophe
from the rust-wire wreckage.
It was the hour before the reckoning
but the only text on the wall read
"It can't happen here."
Pulpits burned, preachers prowled
like panthers
among the singed dollar bills.
Locusts
ate the hedge funds. Vultures ate
the venture capitalists, and
politicians ate the vultures
til the darkness seethed
with undigested bones.
Then finally
over the feeble,
failure-fumed pandemonium
Dawn came with her
exterminator's smile.
December 2021
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Images: Both Untitled, by Zdizlaw Beksinski, copyright held by The Histoical Musem in Sanok Poland
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