Thomas McPhee's Frantic Scrabblings

Crowded

Shoving

Reaching forward

trying to get

a better look at what’s

right in front of their pretty pale faces.

The entirety of beauty and life stands in the marque happy to be.

I couldn’t trust the honesty in your face as you departed this world for the next,
telling me that this was my

1942

was the year my father died,
while so many people became alive again
he died and we wept and
the priest took us by the hand
and his were as weathered as stones
and he told us not to worry
for he was “in a better
place”. I knew this was a lie so
I wrote it down in a note book where
I now have every lie I’ve ever heard.
“I’ll be okay”
“Your mother loves you”
“You’re completely normal”
and now the most recent entry is
a drawing of your face with the blackened
bullet hole between your eyes
which you, my favorite brother,
got in return for
refusing to let my father’s honor be tarnished.
The last thing I write before I
toss the book out onto the street for someone
else to find and learn from is
“Fairness exists”

The bathtub is full of bees waiting expectantly
for the honey to flow forth from the faucet.

The bed has long since burned away
the burning passion of who we were together,
and our life beneath the sheets.

The doorknob has become a snake
that will bite the hand that feeds and the hand that fights,
just always fighting.

The house is retreating back into the forests to be repainted with mold and life and death and the cycle that we all must abide by,
even though I wish I mustn’t.

The god you pray to wont solace me,
but I can’t bring myself to tell you to stop trying.

Pray harder,
then at least one will be happy.

4 months gone, 6 years
left, and all eternity
at stake for me. Feel.

The second hand flows smoothly
then sticks to the black eight like the shipwrecked to the last raft,
the last hope,
before heading back to twelve.

Doomed to repeat,
dizzy from the endless heat,
this all seems all too familiar.

Me,
like this,
and those who bared their fangs are now
at my throat ready to bite down,
clamp on sweet victory over the evil
that terrorized their lives.

I think this fate is fair.

and its waters were older than Methuselah’s bones,
and this water was fed to us all.

We all received
but some got more.
We all received
but some did more.

The few went out
and took their intake and made
it intake for others,
kept the water flowing as if they were
the river of life.

But what will come of the day when,
we aren’t allowed at the well,
when it’s all but wet
and all the water is called cheap imitation.

It
sees
and knows the
game I’ve been playing tonight.
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
troubles my sight, shows me the fraud I really have become.
I lit two fires, but now I return to the camp and kill the one
                                                                  whilst stoking the other.

But then I realized,
it’s just the poison.

“It makes the whole world a little bit brighter”
before it makes it dark.

And here,
here is where I choose
how dark it gets.

It is simply terrifying.

Everyone expects us all to do It,
the culmination of every single one of their
expectations.

They can’t see us breaking the pattern,
acting in any way outside of the box,
the box that is routine.

So when we do,
everyone blinks a few extra times.
Things just seem brighter.

The dead tell much more interesting stories than the living.

All we want to talk about is now and ahead,
like the arrow’s path,
always aiming for the next target.

They,
they don’t talk at all,
and the silence,
the pale faces,
that’s what really makes us think like Black Hawk Down.
Behind enemy lines.

Behind the lines of modern thinking,
back into our roots,
the oak tree in our yard.

The dead carry no vanity,
they only carry what clothes they’re buried in,
as they step into the boat
to take them across the styx.