To Go

To Go

There were no candles

at our table, angel child,

for we were in a place where

no fire would burn, no light shine

except the sickly phosphorescence

of the unquiet mind.

The love I talked

came out in tears.

The anger in your eyes

spit out my pointless words.

After you walked out

and left me burning there

the waiter brought the check

and took my plastic coin

in the profound silence of

the servant's protective tact;

I stumbled in a mist

of dread upheld, too slow

from sour cream and salt

on the still-full glass,

but remembering to

fumble up at the last

the greasy bag of

leftover hate to go.

~March 2015, 

revised November for

Fireblossom Friday: Dread

 

Images: Greasy Takeout Bag, author unknown, via google.Manipulated.

The Pink Candle, 1910, by Henri Rousseau, public domain via wikiart.org

Quills

Quills

Living with her

was like living with roaches,

flimsy, easy to kill but never
really dead, always stutter running

always more hidden than shown

always a scuttling when the switch flipped,

impossible to hold accountable.

In a hard country, the dog chased

the porcupine

catching a hundred razor

barbed quills in his face every time.

Every time, they'd cut and pull them while he cried, 
saying, he's learned now, 

he won't do it again.

Before the blood was dulled dry, he'd be up

hunting, disfigured nose twitching, bantam
brain eclipsed, swollen with the useless rage
of the violated; just so, the child came back at her 
teeth bared, howling outside the den, nose down

for the yelling, the curse, the barbs in its

face, a hundred times.

In the rank stillness Mama Roach
drops her eggcase on the drainboard
casual as shedding a dirty thong.

Mating. Eating. Her own survival
absorbs her, and there will be more
eggs, many more. It's nothing
personal.

~August 2012

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub
 I'll be hosting tonight at the pub, so come join us. Doors open at 3:00 PM EST and link-in is live through tomorrow midnight.

If you would like to hear the poem read by the author, click below:

quills by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

Header photo: Porcupine quills, by lamiot 
from Stekelvarken.JPG (Image:Stekelvarken.JPG) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons