Glass Case
Look into the museum display case:
my eyes are bottled up, disinfected
in chloroform. Untold years I’ve been
fossilized in the manner of my decay.
Confusion is a planet. An astronaut
scooped me with sterilized shovels;
other bitter officers carried rocks with
no sign of life, just volcanic reactions.
Fiefdoms of academics, knaves say
I’m not really there, carried to space
in boots, rolled around on golf balls,
lingering in the flag’s red waves.
Open the cabinet. I hold a white blade
thinner than a atom. A joke death has
told more than once will rumble out,
thought gangs battling their theorems.
Philosophy is more dangerous than
wondering about other planets’ lives.
The unknowns can’t be cooped up.
Chickens won’t roam with heads
cut off. They eat the breasts of men,
nibble on black holes, punish ghosts
explaining the surface of the earth.
Existence’s futile arrival worries
them only a little. Everything else
is taken care of. Dark matter. Dust.
Bio Note
Donald Illich has been published in Fourteen Hills, The Iowa Review, and The New Zoo Poetry Review and has work forthcoming in Passages North, Roanoke Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Pinyon, Cold Mountain Review, CorssConnect Magazine, Hubbub, and The Sulphur River Literary Review.
|
