Death On The Tracks
Trigger warning: mentions of death
Weird-D stepped into the light of a CN locomotive,
eviscerated like a kicked bag of rubber bands
unspooled garden hose, they closed the trainline
all Canada Day and into the dark hours,
his celebration of life marked with yellow Police ribbon,
scraped the rails with ash shovels, polished firetrucks
with mirror chrome wheels hit the tracks with high
pressure water, carrion birds hopped like marionettes,
their shadows freakish in the spinning dance hall lights.
Mortars thumped, spitting cardboard rockets
onto a sky-black canvass; temporary pinwheels
of burning flowers were placed above your grave.
Mourners on the fringes plunged their syringes
during those moments of flashing funerary monuments,
the cortege clatter, the final double thump salute, bright,
sizzled and smoked, into the exhalation of light.
Gerald Arthur Moore is an adventurer, a part-time university lecturer, a high school teacher, and a rugby coach living in New Brunswick, Canada. NON-Publishing released his first book of poetry Shatter the Glass, Shards of Flame in 2018. He received the PubHouse Books Chapbook prize in 2019 for Trigger Fingers.
