Author: © Peter Magliocco
Publisher: Moon Willow Press
Publication Date: June 2012
Ordering: Amazon

Darwin’s Ghost

It breaches time, swallow of sun-lit bramble

Engorging the airs of existence

We tumble beneath, eating wastrel words

Over hot stones in our midst.

All that we hold in evolutionary bliss:

A mammoth cache of exoskeletons

Begs us to find the appropriate descent

Of once human pedigree.

Even Darwin’s ghost metamorphosed

Recently – near our swap meet – into

The shape of things to come:

A hybrid man-beast of great girth,

With wings greater than any angel’s,

Floating around declaring good science

About interactions with new hybrid species

At the London Para-Life Society,

Until – sadly enough – they called in

A ghost hunters’ team to debunk him.

Poem with Rain & Wind

The rains came & thieves took

My computer, my inner eye

On the worldly lifeline beyond.

The night came, then I got off work

As a browbeaten security guard.

A nocturnal effluvium suffusing all,

Even my alley cat recoiled

From the turmoil I cursed.

History is a long wind streaming

Through our digital consciousness,

Winding around dust motes

& life’s desultory debris.

History is the porn star deformed

By excess plastic surgery,

Botox & Jacko’s pill doctor.

Still the rains of nocturnality come

As another drink is consumed

Within the hookah smoke

Descending in the air’s turbulence

To land like History on my brow

Finally, leaving only an imprint

Of the real facts the wind

Covers up in the sandbox of time:

Or in that cliché of time

Hack writers are deluged by

Clutching bottles leaking

Mythic nursery rhymes.