Scorpion Thoughts

I don’t drink much anymore.
He drank enough for both of us.
He tried so hard to forget her soul —
the empty notion of her severed head:
a broken thought of love or death;
numbed indifference, he‘ll never know;
or feel such sanity of men,
the distemper of deadly sapience;
he walks among the pale wanderers,
on the borderlands of infamy,
where hate breeds fierce wars of lust,
seeking ruins among dark foe: a key
to our indifferent earth’s insensate misery;
a way to assuage this fatal comedy
where laughter wryly strangles him;
a gift in glass – a scorpion, a deadly sting:
a skull, a knife, a secret message on the shelf;
all signs of disorder and misrule, alike –
the slow burn that comes with memory and time,
the entwining violence of a heart grown cold;
a mind gone blank, a nothing become nothing more.

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– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.