Richard Magahiz


          March is a month of blossoms

    In the besieged city of Mariupol, officials reported that at least 130 people had been rescued from the rubble 
    of a theater destroyed by a missile strike Wednesday, but that hundreds — and perhaps as many 1,300 — 
    were still missing — New York Times, March 18, 2022

One hundred thirty
  breathing survivors
    from a notional
      missile from some sky
and who knows
  how many other illusions?
    The air has been split
      by non-entities,
darting to sip sweet glory
  from the breasts of children
    as they walk down blue-lined
      safe corridors,
invisible iron bars
  arching over their heads.
    I don't believe
      in sleeping fusion bombs
tucked in close to
  comfort white-knuckled men,
    Really, who can rely on
      the callow and drowsy?
Someone is burning rubbish
  they do not care about
    and foreigners are mute
      for now, under roses.
Your hot-headed aunt
  has gone off on holiday,
    so you shall not see her
      out on the prospect.
One hundred thirty, that is
  a big number, big enough
    to include all the things
      you feel in your chest today.



          Ode to ankles

so much depends
on these points
of faceted
unity
between malleolus
and malleolus
this one
the mirror of
that one
but both are
compulsory
if one fails
there is subsequently
no walking
the force passing
through the joint
multiplies steeply
at a trot
let alone a run
and it must last
for decades
without service
from professionals
all healing arts
lacking subtlety
for penetrating
the joint capsule
thews and nerves
collagen surfaces
under high pressure
just beneath thin
skin
it would seem
too much to ask
for a hundred designers
four thousand engineers
ten thousand years 
science would need
to perfect them
within a budget
and if there are failures
which there are
our great minds
already have much
on their plates
and just could not
work on any
alternate
jeweled 
bearings



          I don't have time to make this sonnet rhyme

Don't know about you, but I’m not on board with living with seventy-five million beasts out of Yeats,
Instead of reading about dystopias we get to witness one as it unfurls before our eyes.
The cops need no secret test to uncover what drives a suspect's heart, exactly,
Like sorting laundry, all the lights go out one door, the darks go in another.
The proud, the educated, and the sanctified, a flood of lawyers follow their worst impulses,
While millions trust suspect networks who ladle water-weak untruths into our common well.
Their pundit class is out of touch. Hell, I'm out of touch, but I'm not touting any tin panaceas for cash.
I still go out with my face covered as though a Biblical plague had taken a wrong turn.

Now thousands — millions? — believe those body bags are fake, that someone's cooked them up to profit!?
I give up. All I see are badly raised people who've learned falsehoods and do what they will.
Freedom is a fine thing, but now exercised by a squad of brain fogged dupes rampaging,
Leaving the remnant to complain about the poison tide even though that crowd won’t listen.
This four billion year old petri dish has been endowed with exciting ways to hurt folks who
Hunker down like me, self-extinguishing eccentrics like the ones you see slouching past Zion.

Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He wrangles computers as a day job but imagines a time when life might center around other things. His work has appeared at Eye to the Telescope, Eccentric Times 3, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Bewildering Stories, Simultaneous Times newsletter, Otoliths, Uppagus, Heliosparrow, and Mobius: the Journal of Social Change. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/

 
 

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