"CIVILIZED DECAY" - a poem by Joseph Breitman
I
woke up as a locust
Bereft of my storm,
Crushed wings fluttering out from
Blasted flesh, firmament of asbestos,
And tear-soaked rubble.
Half of my exoskeleton
Rummaging its way out of
Sacrificed child's sliced open face,
Sheets of shattered glass
And smoking shrapnel
Glimmers beautifully,
Replacing his dulled smile.
Sirens explode
Cloaked, hunched over wraiths
Wrap themselves in desert sand
And miles of distended organs.
Drinking in the air raid,
Remembering to fly
With the aid of screams from drafted
Dragged behind dead,
Interlocking amputees
Crawling their way
To the long-collapsed hospital,
As a great steel star soars in darkened grayness
Dropping the next bomb
That wails and laughs
Through brilliant reddened clouds,
Reassuring;
“There's plenty more where that came from.”
-
I woke up as a centipede
Scurrying out from
Overturned, smoldering
Automobile wreckage,
Inverted and twisted
Nephilim youth trapped inside
Grinning with exhaust fumes
Billowing between holes in withered lips.
A malformed, prepubescent torso
Contorted
In the remaining confines of the exhaust pipe,
Distorted pavement beneath
Littered with skinned faces
Shadowed amputations
And draining colors
Evaporating into the wasteland sky.
They all must have
Missed the warning,
Skyscrapers of rotten meat
Dissect the overstuffed graves
Wretched, scabbed-over survivors
Fornicate through each other
Unnaturally convulsing upwards
On a black rainbow of flowing tourniquets
Trying not to wonder
Who’s the master above
Who’s struggling to impale themselves
With the runoff of hazardous waste disposals
And habit-forming little pills,
Their wounds spilling
Great orange, cancerous clouds.
I’m suffocating
On their half-mechanical remains,
A path of ripped intestines
And antifreeze
Spells out perpetuating halos,
Silenced prophecies of fallen angels,
Muddles beneath
My fragile, interlocking system of legs.
-
I woke up as a pill bug
Cascading down the ceiling
Marked with irregular fluid streaks,
Crimson Rorschach,
Plunged into a caved-in chest
Down a raining flood of dizzying moths
Flecks of burning bath salts
Bombarding the atrocious molecules
Nothing else living moves,
Yet I’m face to face with the enormous
Rotten gummed mouth
Of a foreign man in a foreign place
Gray face, jagged glass and rusted cans
Smashed in the black holes
Where his eyes should be.
Menstrual howls rip through,
Finally exterminating
Already corrupted
Nuclear home,
Trenches of mold and blood
Runs across bathroom tile
Carrying away
The splayed-out and brainless
Cancelled life
That was once unforming
Inside.
Mother lies in mangled abundance
While eyeless father feasts
On the unmade one’s
Tiny brains.
-
I woke up…
A shivering botfly
Or maybe something entirely new,
Wheezing into new life
From pale, eroded pores
Lining the last unmutated child,
Born from the cataclysmic severance
Left as a final replacement for
This ruined orbiting ovum
In blighted space.
I'm the last sign of life
Now begotten,
With no sight
No feeling
No misguided, deluded purpose,
Only this gradually disappearing notion,
A fading hue of consciousness,
Which gifts me unimaginable gratitude
That I didn't come back
In the doomed and disgusting
Damnation that is
Human flesh.
-
Joseph Breitman is a writer who has always valued and utilized poetry, prose writing, and storytelling to channel and process a worsening and increasingly bleak outlook on the world and to find some small semblance of meaning and value in the dirge of existence. He hopes to bring a sense of recognition to those who feel similarly and to shine a direct light on the horror, nonsense, and existential meaninglessness of the human race to those who refuse to face the fact that human life may not be worth living.
_Instagram Contact:
https://www.instagram.com/prisoner_in_yr_skull/?hl=en