Blackbirds fly from the rusted chimney
a talisman of smoke and wings
choking my eyes with their stillness
while worms walk their wasteland
marshalling their parade out of a prison
that melts away into memory.
Sunshine collides with the clouds
forging them into steel tears
that baptize our salted corpse
and resurrect hope from a cobbler’s
coffin, leather be the soul of your name.
Squirrels square their solidarity
remembering their buried foxholes
of deciduous fruit-meat, a hungry
man’s dinner for a perfect midnight
dessert drizzled with winter’s permafrost.
Garlic and chives impregnate the day
with phallic shafts of jade jetting from
the richness of autumn, past the dark
through the decayed black death of winter,
a vaccine injected intravenously from the spring.

∞

Submitted as part of “National/Global Poetry Writing Month” (#NaPoWriMo #GloPoWriMo).
Today’s prompt: write a poem that, like The Color of Pomegranates and “City That Does Not Sleep,” incorporates wild, surreal images. Try to play around with writing that doesn’t make formal sense, but which engages all the senses and involves dream-logic.