The beautiful & damned come into the raven’s hold,
not looking for the remains of Poe
with relics of supernatural sanctuary.
Starlight waits still
in spider-webbed cracks for
a bygone age,
far from the maddening monstrance
of dead human gods
They disrobe, now excited children, feeling
nudity’s rainbow caressing their jaded organs,
(fulsome with nature’s unkind scars
to wander across the taboo barriers).
Desecrated saints bear witness to
the long defiling once human
in these foul caves tourists trash,
not giving a damn for the fallen deer
once painted as talisman on walls of stone
murky with sodomized secrets.
From lips of sacrificed flesh thoughts come
as sins now boldly whispered,
with pictographs of still suffering spirits
There, in the space between earthen shadows,
the crypt where burgeoning bones unite
to form the cosmic-christened humanity
yet to come, yet to waken
within the great body of truth
re-creating us.
Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active for years doing poetry, art, and small press stuff. His most recent poetry books are The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash) and Night Pictures from the Climate Change (Cyberwit.net). Nominated several times for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart for poetry and fiction, he has recent work at MODERN LITERATURE, A THIN SLICE OF ANXIETY, FEVERS OF THE MIND, and elsewhere.