Galerius' lil boat of rainbows

Ethanol makes things quiet. That’s
what the elderly whisper, even now,
as they squat on putrid food,
six legs searching
the landscape for a lost lust
and compound
lenses flitting in every direction and one more.

In its murky stare, they say,
lay countless flies peering back,
collapsed upon one another
in a shallow grave
filled with the brave who gave their
lives in pursuit of a higher dream.
So says the unwritten epitaph,
scrawled in dust on
bathroom walls and fallen leaves,
and so it shall be.

Say I,
you came from the skies
like a lightning screw, you flashed above
with those eyes of ice and brightened mine
like fruit flies scuttling around the plastic cavern
that holds them tight, a mother’s embrace in the
evening light.

Here there’s space – here there be
monsters three centimeters in length and taking
three breaths each as I dump them out, the
executioner’s hold in the dimmed morning. I don
no black mask but clutch on the scope of a metallic
socket, fingers pressed against the glass so hard that I
am afraid of breaking it even more than I am afraid of

breaking down amid three others,
working beside me. Three
more come in with their steaming coffee,
gripping almost as hard.
We’re holding onto something of(f) course –
else we’d be blown away.
Sisyphus could have no greater pursuit than to step
outside this room and roll right back in,
ensconced with my winged brethren.
One moves despite the carbon dioxide
kissing his brain and scratches the surface
of the table. He is writing poetry.
Another chews a story
within his clicking wings, so gory in his method but so
pure in his mind, the only unspoiled one in the world as he
stares out into the great beyond and prays to the limelight.
But mine is a neon sign that screams BABYLON
with so much agony and bluster that you’d forget it was an invitation
meant to ration three billion souls and three billion more to
take a train and cut through sore spores of an insect purgatory.

Death walks in and asks for a pure man. She’s blinded for
a second then recovers, roves to the microscope felled by some rudder
in the air that withers amid the growing storm. A paper blusters and
blows its way across the floor, scuttling like an insect wrapped in
the ink of papyrus that ancient Pharaoh rubbed against his palm nervously
as he looked upon his pyramid, light shining in a beam upon the helm.
The captain had fled his realm to the blight of swarms that roved the
dusty stones, slapping like a sinner’s palm against the altar of the building –
heavenly damnation – threatening fire and water if it cannot have salvation.
It spreads arms wide and screams “Brothers, have me!” like a sacrifice
in angry vice that reaches out with divine alms and spreads the spittle of a
lashing tongue across the universe, burning magma revolving around one another
and imploding like a blind mountain spewing a note to harmonize with the
storm above, coming together in holy matrimony against the sea of Earth
that grows from a pinprick against the blood of something higher that fell against
the surface of a carbon dioxide table and solidified.

For three generations and three more, I asked out loud
then fell silent with experience. I was a
triplicate, signed in blood as I
donned my black hood and hid my
glossy winged doppelganger on the
stained table in front of me. Then I
watched it fall
into the ethanol,
wondered if there was a God,

and reached for another.

- Galerius

I don't mean to degrade your poetry with mine. :p