by Daniel Edward Moore
What I want to do, I do not.
That which I hate, I do.
As far as I know it was only
a whimper of winter’s dark remorse:
the hand’s black glove
on the door’s blue ice,
a hypothermic eulogy for the engine’s death
sung by the god of grease.
When my neighbor with a cross
tattooed on his skull
said, kiss it, be redeemed.
I thought, even his heart is missing a beat,
starlings ate while sleeping.
Although my conscience
declined the gesture
made by the saint in the frozen light,
it felt like that butch summer
in the scrapyard when
eternity’s choir of bird baths and tires,
buzzed with mosquitoes high on malaria.
Angels tenderly prepped the skin.
Devils did the poke.
::
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, New Plains Review, Flint Hills Review and Book of Matches. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
Image: Fabrice Villard
Psaltery & Lyre 