CAREFUL NOW
a blue mat
of confusion
carved
in a blinding thought,
swelled in a roughening
pillbox, is
a wasteland of
unsettled mind.
windy butterflies
are cheap on the
moon’s surface.
dying
is a splendid
notion for every
little headache
where
your scream is
a mutilation
like a small
small dog
with bark
the size of night.
NIGHT PARKED ON THE EDGE OF RAIN
for those who haven’t eaten
or been worn down like shore rock,
the sound going off in the dark
is surf shredded posthumously from sand;
a mind unmuscled from bone.
but this isn’t about dieting.
this is about losing the substance that fills skin
as faucets drip asphalt
and breeze raises mold.
within a glacier, a match struck
is a struggling cave and
unchained from canvas,
audubon’s birds spill berries
from decomposing beaks.
everyone lost teeth.
and what did they really think?
the whole world was never watching
but starting fires simply to stay warm
and sweating billy clubs,
after the limpid tear gas floated in.
bodies
now, then mountains of flies, wait for a microbe.
now we are dead at our own feet,
diseased in being.
now, my eight-year-old son,
waking naked,
has wild dreams.
Bio:
Livio Farallo is co-founder/co-editor of Slipstream. His work has appeared in Corporeal, Cardinal Sins, Brief Wilderness, South Florida Poetry Journal, California Quarterly, Misfit, and elsewhere. He is recently retired from teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology and Ecology at SUNY-Niagara.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 