Beyond the Flesh-Colored Bullets is a poem written by Peter Magliocco and shared with The Ugly Writers under the theme Intrusive Thoughts for the month of May
Dissolve into the insistence of desire, take the vanquished petal
from the beholding child. Brace for a shadowy scintillation
overwhelming itself, a scribbled sunrise
Ascending the mountain we left behind.
After the Middle East bombing, no one remembers you
except friends who made it out, while others
meld into statistics wherein I feel the coil
of madness chained to history we can’t revise.
In your memory, a visitation comes with summer
I kiss the blood from,
seeking the last taste of ourselves
while watching sunlight eat away
a dark corner of myself —
hungry with fear — as time splotches
victims of war in a spidery grasp
only our ghost selves know.
Now it’s morning stillness
at any forgotten beach
where we make the awful swim
beyond the pale, beyond the deep burning
of those forever erased
by the flesh-colored bullets
we sacrifice our humanity to.
Do you hear me, Rosa?
The exact fact of being outside things
never got me down before.
The flesh-earing bacteria of hatred
consuming our now moribund love,
all that evades sweet salvation
on the pages of renegade poetry?
Only purple prose masking the real news
the sky is falling, just bitcoins raining
over the video hell of bankrupt dreams
bereft of you, me, & all the multitudes
screaming words no one hears
bursting from the mouths of dead poets
come ash-colored tongues for specimen days
