The Dictators
An odor stayed on in the canefields:
Carrion, blood, and a nausea
Of harrowing petals.
Between coconut palms lay the graves, in their stilled
Strangulation, their festering surfeit of bones.
A finical satrap conversed
With wineglasses, collars, and piping.
In the palace, all flashed like a clockdial.
The gloved laugh redoubled, a moment
Spanning the passageways, meeting
The newly-killed voices and the buried blue mouths. Out of sight,
Lament was perpetual, and fell, like the plant and its pollen,
Forcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves.
And bludgeon by bludgeon on the terrible waters,
Scale over scale in the bog,
The snout filled with silence and slime
And vendetta was born.
