Eyes

I snapped machines at fairly
sensitive ends.
 You’ll examine the hanging 
entrails like robovores.
A twisted circuit of all axioms
 masticated on by brittle, decaying
teeth, enjoining the power of amelioration
and deterioration; just matters if one uses
 petals, gears, or both, for eyes.


The Great Queen

The Queen sat silently
by her stupid glass-war game
which garnished her needs
for a reckless, homegrown fame.

The pieces fall over and over
in her nimble hands,
shattering the rules of the game,
cleaning up her enemies 

with a single swipe. Deep 
is the devotion she keeps.
And as her fragile body goes to sleep
not an enemy can rebuild itself,

to promise a stance against 
the dreaded Queen and her 
little, powerful hands
that once bothered, begins to stir.

Suspended Animation

It’s hard to take the essence of the sun
and crush it down like garlic in your kitchen,
but it’s done.

A stinging breath is in the thickening air.
The earthly cave-of-a-house is full of shadows
whispering, “We’re next.”

For all of the light that I’ve forgotten over the years
I say, take me quietly, I’m not hiding,
then go forth. 

Trample down the Earth’s corners and rounded waters.
There’s something ethereal about its efforts to 
euthanize the silence. 

The Dead Lilies’ Conversations 

In a faded, stained picture
were two men: one with a smile,
the other – faceless.

In that face is a pit of emptiness
that couldn’t even fit into
the universe.

For you go searching for the black
and for the white, and you find
all the colors in between.

Search his face for millennia
and naught will be found, except
his unsearchable smile.

The Event

Taken by the new age smell,
intoxicatingly white in her face-
a panicking photon, stripped of its way,
traveled through its bones- confetti thin -
branching out like a rounded lion’s roar
amongst a field of tall, yellow grass.

You’ve Always Loved the Cold

To think I was good at squandering
your dreams,

you told me you dreamt last night of us
in a star-lit field

basking in the paint-freckled sky, holding hands,
touching foreheads

like two battlefields trying to fight for peace,
but there will never be any.

You told the sky to hold off on love until you
were absolutely sure,

but you told me that you jump into pools head first
and enjoy the sensation of being

in that moment, feeling the skin rise as hills,
steam seeping through your pores,

and love biting your skin.

Aaron Wiley