Two Poems
by Rob McCarthy
In the Good Old Summertime
We followed the scout’s vector to the hive.
Hansel & Gretel at the papery
skull-house, crawling blackly with waspish life.
(Later that summer just a dry, empty thing:
grue-stiffened bandages; mummy’s windings.)
Never to return, that wasp ascendency.
Did the derelict hive (creaking gibbet,
lightly a-swing in the small wind) survive
one winter, or two?
Like childhood. Curiously
gone-missing one day, lost through a failure
of attention. What needed to be wrought,
was not. It lasted only as it was beheld.
Should have shown it Gorgon’s time-disruptive
phiz, I guess. A stony immortality,
(postures of stricken delight?) better than
vanishing, better than gone; yesterday’s
moonlight;
like the wasp-stinger, plunged in the wobbly
toddler, a black needle in, abruptly,
eruptive flesh (red, metamorphic,
objective correlative of the freeze-framed scream),
abandoned there by the assassin queen.
Sleep Swords
Sleep’s raveled sleeve . . .
has it begun
to unknit itself again?
Needles click/clack.
They puncture and riddle,
cavort, like Punchinello,
upon the sleep-stage, while
slumber’s fractious spindles
elongate,
burst like bombards above the axon
highways.
The REM state
is leaving lesions
in its wake.
Stalagmites and stalactites
have erupted in the fanged night’s
interior theatre. Such
uproars they do lodge
in the skull’s inmost loge.
Sleep, it seems, is trying to wake up.
How conscience doth make targets of us all!
Spun north to south to fortune’s lukewarm middle,
turned and turning on the knife-artist’s wheel.
Here, a close call; there, a hit palpable
(yet another of inwits the agenbite?).
Poniards probe and daggers plunge abetting
the paradoxical ache that numbs
when it comes, confirming fraught dispatches
from the sinewy outliers, the smooth-muscle
skirmishers under-equipped, abandoned by
logistics; quite
starved out, unsupplied.
Soldier in a shattered army, me, dreading
light’s return, with its daggers
of the mind
stabbing
blood to iced peripherals;
with its swords of circulation
hacking
the comfortably dead
tissue
back into a sort of Lazarus-life:
back into a sort of
simulacra of incisions;
of nightmare scalpels giving dumb mouths
to wounds; of dendrites dragged down from their cold
heaven,
see them spark and writhe. . .
snakes in a basket, cut wires half-alive.
And pain, as it will,
waxes and waxes. To give its monotony
a glamour, I imagine it to be
a retribution;
and so is gifted crime and punishment
(those airy nothings?) with a local
habitation and a name.
And judgment, when it comes,
is as if etched with burrs and nibs
of fire
inscribing
neurons
and arteries
and veins.
BIO: Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. His work has been published in Orbis, The Alchemy Spoon, New Ulster Review, Ice Floe Press, and other journals and magazines.