Rhetorical Questions

“Rhetorical Questions,” “When I look at the world,” and “A lone Cry”

In Issue 21 by G.T.

Rhetorical Questions

You answered my rhetorical questions.

A search for certainty that

Thieved my rhetoric

Replaced it with yes and no’s

You turned my world binary

Made my epiphany quotidian:

A tropical disease that

Denies the feverish

Rush of frenzied surprise.

Mercury trapped in glass.

Exotic escape turned to pallid sighs

Ringtones in bed

Turning poetic polyphony

Into turgid technology

Until feelings seem synthetic

Tapped on a keyboard

Where a question mark hides above a slash

Messages reduced to texts that obscure meaning

Memories crammed into gigabytes that flatten expression

Arguments over the controller

Nightly

We dilute the question of power

It does not match the furniture

Is this really love?

The question hits the corners

It is a thought that can shake the bed

-Yes,

you said.

And turned out the light.

When I look at the world,

I do not see through the pupils

They are too untrustworthy, too distractible

Too passive a thing

Wooden desks, bony knees, a hand raised,

A thirst for knowledge, accepted innocence

Reconstructed Incidents

All for a teacher’s smile

Learning to beguile

Tall knees no longer fit under those hard-oak desks

I have grown tall and culpable

I can no longer see the world through a set of eyes

Eyes are too beautiful

An admired thing

That presumes a soul

They are the thing that gets doodled,

The pencil delights in the perfect curvature,

The joy of a circular thing,

Like writing the O O O of first love

Whilst blinded by the lustre of it all.

When I look at the world,

I see through the tongue

Strong and oozing

Dripping with greed

I see the world through the cage of growing teeth

Primitive tools

Sharpened for battle

Spears of survival

They need no lesson in how to devour

It is only when the lights turn off

That they clutch together

Rattling in their cavernous chamber

They were stuck together that night when you cried

And I couldn’t open up.

The words you

Needed could not find their way

Past the betraying tongue

That guards the gate to the gaping chasm below

Please do not go looking for that place.

It is a place of hidden words that are strewn with bile

Beware my gnashing gnashers

You were too kind

When you said I was lost

A lone Cry

A lone cry for the tear-spilled timber

Where scars trickle out of simmering stars,

The moon howls and the ash unearths

Where the skyline blurs with a fanning of sails

Hand-held and stupid, the curtains fall

Far-flung fools of a once-upon start

Memories probed for the shallows thrusting

Melting in thunder and rheumy-eyed words.

A temple of hands still seeking a steeple

A memory creased in the back of a car

The tyres ingesting the rubber soaked road

Signing again for the stories untold.

About the Author

G.T.

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