Stop the presses: Death Has Last Word!
by Allen Speed
Don’t faint, but your long, cool glass of water
Is the ball-sweat of a burning saint.
In the hedgerows, in the markets, murder
And its oozy products are the gory norm.
Don’t think that like some shoulderless skink
You’ll blindly make off in the mud with your life;
Your only question is how death’s coming,
By spade or truck or flood or stoat or knife.
Stay up late, hysteria will fill you
With the natural world’s repulsive goos.
That’s not the oil furnace you hear thrumming,
Or the afterburn of last night’s booze,
But the bloody murmur of The Dire News
And its glowering editor, Ted Hughes.
Download the podcast (reading by Dave Bonta)
Allen Speed has poems published or forthcoming under this and other names in Chimaera, Literary Bohemian, Able Muse, Yellow Mama, and other venues.
qarrtsiluni 