Face of a Fate

In the midst of a Chinook wind,
A dire reminder of a Northern January,
A gentleman strolls
down an exhausted street.
Drawing his cold hands
To his bristled head,
Combing the brittle hair
Through wheat thin fingers,
He then stops.
Glancing at clod on the sidewalk,
Appearing to be his unshed tears,
He takes a deep, veiled breath.
Keeping his distance from a place
Where all is too real, too human;
A land that assigns morality
By his own position in dreary time.
Once again, staring ahead down the road
The concrete softens with the heather sky.
Walking this clotted road
Whose cracks and wrinkles
Resembles the hope of his firmament
Makes him forget,
So he continues.

$11.82

A murder of cigarettes.
His insides on the outside
beneath an abstruse silhouette of a power line.
Pillowed rain pools in ruts; riddled woman’s sickened strut.
Trash burrowed beneath flooded posts
coasting the frame of a frozen pond
spelling out the name of mythical orphans.
But a blackened eye is perched so sweetly; a loaded view.
Its head tilt with an assuming stare
flaunting a flamboyant fickle thought.
Cocking its neck; slanted wings,
a figure eluding God.
Silkened feathers oiled in disease and stalking virus
it waltzes back and forth an infected trapeze
slowly observing the scene with ease.
A vigilant vision it sees
but an unusual absent of judgment it lacks.
Talons gripped this weakened twine; a softened bow
sinking with the weight of such a swagger.
Peering into a knighted sky
its wings broadened into a cloak reeking of death.
An embodied gargoyle, deserter of St Peters perhaps,
clutches its sides and glares into the breath of soul.
Humane eyes are not the only ones to agonize over.