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Death is a Light-Filled Bell
The sun is an artifact,
so foreign to the interrogated walls
of my body. In a row
of flooded subtemples, lush
with regret, I’ll wait.
Nothing heals
quickly enough here.
My age slips
out of my mouth
onto the floor, unfurling
like a crumbled missive.
Connections are spasms
under silt. Beyond flesh
on flesh; some vagary
for starved bones.
Posthumous
These thoughts kept
me alive, amongst
wildfires and turbines.
I inhabit a temple
of departure. Its serpentine
halls layer above me.
It is January and the
doors have gone missing. It is
January, but the proof remains elusive.
As our mouths are tamed,
we’re carried too far beyond
the threshold to be retrieved.
The child I was stands
like a monolith; a vision
too intangible to inhabit.
Untitled II
The past is like lightning;
weightless and singular. I
emerge from the beast
only to find sleeping wreckage.
Details of frost span from
my subconscious. The wind’s retort
is only a dream of stirring
flames.
This body is a mask,
painted during an undulating
trance. The cry of youth
grew into manifold darkness.
Obsidian
The host of flames
my face became
a buoyant albatross
we’re supplanted trees
knelling for warmth
Subterranean as sleep
that night subdued by
hot tears
the elegiac harm
pared me open
For all that’s unknown
the earnest source
is placated logic
A deeply crossed world passes between us
woven into absence
Stare
Lit by a flock of birds,
the lucid pain takes shape.
My voice is an encounter with
denial; on rooftops and behind
permanently closed doors.
Though confessions protrude like
ice shelves, we loom in the
silence between our former selves.
Crowned with absurdities, I stumble
into the unexalted body of night.
An undying angst shepherds in some
blatant majesty, birthing articulating flames.
Behind my armor is only a
zeal for heavy rain. I saw you
covered in anonymous flesh, years
away from your words. Discord remains
perched upon my chest, subsisting on preludes.
Somewhere in the landscape are
gales of emotion. My endeavors are
a fugue; leading to the maimed
light within.
J.L Moultrie is a native Detroiter, poet, and fiction writer who communicates his art through the written word. He fell in love with literature after encountering Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Baldwin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many others. His work appears or is forthcoming in Datura Literary Journal, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Visitant, Backchannels, The Free Library of the Internet Void, and elsewhere. He considers himself a literary abstract artist of modernity.