venus fly trap

venus fly trap

my brain is a cage

carried aloft on lime-colored waves,

and so is the love we live inside

a wool scarf that suffocates

until time resuscitates the ghost of greta garbo

grey-faced floating up from some long abandoned

nickelodeon in the middle of nowhere. you stand

tremulous on the brink of memory,

eyes heated saucers expanding in a field of stars

soon to shatter as your legs linger on a last syllable.

the mouth slams shut. no measured gust or

pleasurable release. abdomen dissolved; thorax vanishing

like a child’s quarter in some storefront gumball machine.

from here it is mere mechanics.  fear is but the shadow

that follows relinquished feeling.

the dealer has stacked the deck

fortuna has spun her will, and your squeal

feeds my lust to kill.  historians with their microscopes

can glimpse rome burning in the brightened pus of your melted wings.