Sick of pretending I dont see our ghosts.
Lifes pregnant landslide,
Displaying souls stomach contents.
We sit and sleep, sliding towards and past sanities shelf life. Huddling in herd immunity, Humanity under house arrest.
Quarantine long ago devoured
the low hanging fruit of novelty
Alcohol and pedestrian domestic sex
And now we meet somewhere in between
Each others dreams,
roleplay of apathy and entropy.
Pallbearing each others parents heavy history. Detritus of take aways , beer stains,
Netflix and us. Straining
In to phone screens, the tragic new traditions
Making moats besieging us.
The news is an hourly dripfeed of banal
Desensitised despair.
A little flavour of death with dinner.
Infecting our egos, developing
Our national antibodies for annihilation.
Local mortalities rising scream
Like a calcified fetus spins inside me.
Civilisation is an open dolls house, an abandoned ant farm. This new century where the living are naked and the dead wear black bags and disinfectant on t.v.
Humans are the orphans on earths family tree, elsewhere and everywhere
All animals sing praise of their maker,
Mocking our phyric mastery.
And over the hum of the refrigerated morgue You might hear the bodies singing hymns too. That possibility is prophesy. Where they lie Now, soon you could be.
……..
Rob Buchanan was one of the winners of 2015 Poetry Ireland Introductions series. He has been published in a number of poetry journals and magazines. His work has been anthologised and translated into Irish and Greek. His first collection The Cost of Living was published in 2018. He performs his work at poetry nights across the country.