The Occident and the Ember

    by Luke Evans

A grainy excuse on a solar-powered morning

belies the smoked lamplight by your window.

Curtains peel back, still and shorn bare, your

Draconian standards paltry beneath your torture.

Endless pendulum, I beg of you. Someone tell

Father; I can't stand your breath anymore, the breaking,

ghoulish memory of gone tomorrows. When I look at you,

heaven is a dream I can't wake up from. Was that

indecisive? Animals harbor better feelings. I am

judgmental, barren and damaged as if by famine and

Kraken and any derangement, all self-fulfilling prophecies

laughed over, spilt. What do you see when you look at

me? Ill-shaven, badly-bruised, can't you see I miss you?

Not for all the greenery, all the insurance; all the mish-mashed,

Oedipal complexes we employ, the wishy-washy fixtures; the granulated

parents we forge from clay and dust only to destroy. We were kings,

queens, Edith, rulers of this world, used only to make straight lines,

re-write the memoirs of our youth. No one sees this, it's not

statutory if no one believes it. It's dark again.

Tractor trailers down-shift on the freeway. It is a muggy,

uncared-for night, left on the stoop without a towel.

Vitamins spread across the table. Picked up, one by one.

Without the harbingers, I couldn't have known. Certainly not you.

X-factors come into play boldly. I really am sorry it came to this.

Yesterday we buried you. They walk in dark suits, dark shoes, ties reach a

zenith before the plummet. Tonight, I will dream heaven again, for you.

© 2014  Luke Evans

Luke Evans writes sometimes, about life or science or love or mountains or whatever else his experience or imagination allows. He lives in Colorado and works too many hours, but enjoys the views anyway. His poetry has been most recently found in The View From Here, Poetry Quarterly, and Joyful.