Broken Song Sings
free verse
I only sing inside
my savaged chords
torn by forced speech
subject to my grinding output
battered by a hailstorm of thought
they didn’t choose their song
conscripted to carry a wry humor
a pithy bark and hoarse observations
scratchy as an old summer day
abused as a dog-eared book.
Poor innocent reeds
brutally harnessed to convey
checkered cynicism
inside jokes
and plaintive sobs.
My cracked voice is a consequence
of inescapable entropy
a sequence of decline that began at birth
a lovely nihilism that ends
in a concert of divine disintegration.
But
if you touched me inside
massaged my organs
just so
I’d sing like a theremin
pluck my ribs
play my beating flute
harmonize my orgasmic melodies…
And
remember our permeable skin
how we moved back and forth
amid and between each other
as clouds dissipate
naïvely merging
in submission to irreversible decay.
