Peter Magliocco

Mired in the Last Supper of Mass Murder

(after watching the Buffalo, NY shooting live-streamed)

It hovers in depths plaguing the twisted hearts

from bodies of the swimming stillborn –

now gone from crystal light of a common humanism,

their crimes for a dying century are here forever

inside the market of martyrs

/forging an elemental end

to new hope

in (your) hungering eyes,

like twin cockerels

of insufferable smallness/

invisible to the lure of shooting victims

preening, in indecent exposures

of the bedraggled afterlife,

disguised as nubile virgins

auditioning in America’s big talent show.

What was taken from us

belongs to coming generations more fully

than the wisp of madness,

what civilization has bequeathed to

the multitude of current events

into a present anarchy of ephemeral being

the hours barely move around;

until the past remains ubiquitous with

old gimcracks

we smell rotting in the temporal sod

of a shallow water bed, exhibiting remains

of the fallen reflected in the CCTV.

Now we go beyond the dream of progress

marching stately, across

a ground zero still intact

drugging us with lies, an intolerant sophistry

of skeletal music – just wind missing

the ear of salvation, what belies the coming spring.

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active in the small press as writer, editor, and artist for several years. He has poetry in Ink In Thirds, The Pangolin Review, Literary Yard, I Am Not A Silent Poet, New Ink Review, and elsewhere. His most recent poetry book is Particle Acceleration on Judgement Day from Inspired.

The Devil’s Screenplay

Trying to save you, I walk into a world

(shadows slithering) through complicated

jungles of primeval darkness.

SCENE 1: where appearances are remade

& the electronic gods resemble apes?

No, jump-cut to another

Interior CLOSE-UP

Of your fallen mauve scarf, edge-frayed

Having fallen over the face of a stand-in Jesus,

& once worn around necks of alabaster

The camera’s lens will lovingly linger on

Before panning, slowly, to a pool of glistening blood.

You will CUT to the sanguine sword

(upraised, love-dripping?) in my hands guilt

like the stigmata of lovers –

Covered with forensic stills, then in kinetic motions

reflecting the killer’s panic. I mumble the occult

imprecations to the dramatic background music

Drum-deafening me; you rise,

Moribund but alive (cue the special effects here,

let all the secrets of cinema hang out in nude pixels

in exhibitionistic frame-frenzy):

“Your dialogue upsets me here

& I halt the camera

Eyeing you in the flesh now, seeing reality

For the first time on your face, not the screen

Or pixel-bright viewing surfaces….”

Yet voodoo in a makeshift rosary

Scents the tabernacle’s flesh

You bear on your sylvan back for me,

Reframing each image into a self-portrait

Of perverse desire I carve into the backbone

Of blinding vision

we FADE TO BLACK

Wakening to Starfish

Between the barriers of consciousness

sentient things mutate in a fishbowl

known as the mind’s ocean.

Not just the cell in us perishes

but also the respective shadows

lingering in ghost-like metaphor

must awaken from a cloudy memory.

I wish “thought” was a supernova then,

a brain-powered star reborn to send

old fissions beyond a cosmic basement.

Someday I’ll awake from long sleeps of reason

to greet my multiple personalities –

more alive than facts of abnormalities,

more real than Rembrandt’s self-portraits

glinting endlessly on fathomless light waves.