Tribes

painting by fernando botero

Tribes

The past is romantically rotted,
regularly rewritten
the vampire sucking at the future;
we know we can’t go back
and forth from the grave
yet still we cling to his blood clotted cloak
for that deathsmell high he sells,
the lie we can't live without.

We bathe in the black essence of a thousand
million compressed reptiles' tarred blood
fatten on the pretense a pigmentation
a language, a way of walking,
a perfume, a pose,
a red dress, a neighborhood,
incubates an alien immune to
thought or grief.

We eat the spiders of our tribes and
call them good beef, though it’s closer
to soylent green, suck out the phantom
succulence from the compliant citrus
of our senses, and always always
we worship a golden coined god
whose paper horns
nod and approve.

Joyann Jones

aka: hedgewitch

Posted over on her site Verse Escape
Listed as #9 over on dVerse Poets-Botero Prompts