Eyeless 'mid Eyes

 

Eyeless ‘mid Eyes

© 2007 by Will Northerner

 

 

Started a destroyed poem trying

Unabashedly to make word sense of

Maggot swarms clocking the writhing

And stink and eventual ingested disappearance

Of what they infested...

 

Nix the word maggot in favor of say...

“End Worms” a genre of corpse eaters

more vast than mere maggots

Eyeless eaters

Relentless consumers

Grotesque gluttons

Worm forms swelling and heaving

With peristalsis

 

How many writers note the eventuality

Of coming worms gorging themselves on

Poet minds

Dead artist eyes

Blind larvae eating the eyes 

That created worlds to muse ‘pon

Canvas and paint being something

Worms don’t go for with relish

 

I hold no horror nor amusement

In the thought of my bodily leavings

Going to end worm guts

Let the critters have me

All that dies with me

 

Yet I draw the writhing undulating mass

Like a treasury of facile arabesques

I might easily have portrayed the creatures

In gold

 

A tribute to their tireless calling

Sending fetid decay back to fertile loam

Make compost for lavish gardens

Rather than gruesome corpse filled

boxes meant to keep visual wasting

In check

 

Endlessly