PLAGUES

It was the machines that went rust
and collapsed into lakes and ran red
among the boat oil and chemical spill.

Sumped in the marshlands, the mayflies
were swarming with sex and the frogs
multiplied like oleaginous oligarchs.

They struck up the dust with the drill,
but it was their fingers that itched
at the bites in the sand grained heat.

Whether it was oxen or mosquitoes
or tsetse or goats or wasps,
we flinched some at hooves and wings.

It came from the lab and killed horses,
dogs, livestock and pigs.
The pyres released virals into the crops.

What we have burned. What is ash.
It is fallout. A snowfall of radium
that dusts our skin with boils and rash.

Strange weather that coats
the Statue of Liberty in ice and snow.
Hurricanes belching from cooling towers.

Stripped cornfields. Grasslands stripped.
The factories stripped of their guts.
The workers stripped. Stripped bodies gassed.

They shone so many lights there were shadows
in every direction. So much light
it was impossible to see through. Dark truth.

If you painted lamb's blood on your door,
a lamb died in vain. Man made the future
and it swept them aside like a scourge.

Listen to the poem here: http://soundcloud.com/gavin-hudson-1/plagues

ALL HALLOWS YEAR

I saw her peering from a black cab circling Seven Dials;
a paper-thin, powdery leer, a skeleton's smile

in a blue velvet cowl. I swear she held a scythe
and carried a burning torch that blazed

and blackened windows where it passed. Her ladies
in waiting were succubi, a swarm of flies

who stalked behind the carriage, stone-locusts
wearing the brick of the buildings to dust,

swept smoke blown, people going bone, gone ghost
after the funeral march. The taxi turned hearse.

Danse Macabre. Dogs and children thinned, scourged,
emaciated in the flow. Meanwhile the corpse, gorged,

fattens and bloats until it reaches the Thames edge
where it emerges and floats. The river runs black sludge.

Storm drains. Red and blue ministers drown in the bilge
pumped water. The streets are rinsed with blood.