Issue No. 14, Piety - SOC (for cabin fever)

it’s an ailing life methinks…
The pine straw stinks of stars and alien links
to an after-life I’ll never see…
To the shining soul I’ll never be…
What has become of me, what has begun in me
that now stings at the core of abandoned hives?

The links in me brain are forging a head
with which I’m no longer familiar…
There is a bird in my vernacular I can recognize
only as vermillion…ooh as scarlet as wine-dark seas…
The trees flow ‘gainst the sky much as fire flows
through oxygen, much as flames blow through the stanchions
of mis-appropriated and bank-vacated farms…

These recent days pass by unalarmed…
Scarlet letters burn in my mailbox…
I have no votive candles to proffer
the inquisitors of my air of privacy.