“Black Hole Desert,” “The Relativity of Loss” and “Hip Hop”

“Black Hole Desert,” “The Relativity of Loss” and “Hip Hop”

“Black Hole Desert,” “The Relativity of Loss” and “Hip Hop”

Black Hole Desert

Weary sun sighs deeply.

Rattlesnakes seek solace.

Tumbleweeds bleed wisdom.

Saguaro reach deep into green pockets

of scattered water loose

in rancid blankets of arid certainty.

Scorpions seethe, swallowing sand,

each and every granule

a microcosm of the infinite.

Heat has no name

the unmoved mover, the tabula rasa

of forgotten ancestors

who once roamed desert oceans.

Only stones know

the pure brilliance of blue dreams.

Water, cosmic goddess of life

laughs caustic spasms

of splintered denial.

How flowing is not knowing.

Move with winds fierce,

gnawing buffalo bones bleached white

by time’s futile satire.

Laugh at eternity’s fragility,

how only stars can implode

sending blackness into holes

of anti-light, magnetic death.

The Relativity of Loss

I am the alpha and omega

the cosmological constant

caught in Doppler shifts

descending and ascending

accelerating and decelerating

beyond the speed of light.

Like some free-floating photon

I linger in my eternity of flight.

No common center of gravity holds me

as one who has known

the despair of departing galaxies.

How your cold blue eyes

defy this space-time continuum.

I am the quasar in disguise

pulsating in my own black hole

having lost the event horizon

of your touch, scent and voice.

Hip Hop

Ready or not here I come to blow your world. Jump, jump, everybody jump cause I got more rhymes than the Bible’s got psalms says the House of Pain as the real Slim Shady stands up just standing there and watching her burn, that’s alright because I love the way you lie I love the way your eyes cauterize my cries putrid in the velvet night of lies living large on a canvas of Tanguy lost in that French eye lurid dreams deferred exploding into abstract angularity. Hey must be the money. Money, money makes the world flow like rivers of rhyme, ciphers on the Rhine getting down goin round n round into circles lost in the sound of the found. Low, low, low next thing you know she hit the floor goin low and movin wit da flow of the Mississippi south into deep parishes on the Ponchartrain skimming them shores of St. Francisville down the Rouge of Baton slitherin southward into the bottomland of alluvial plains Delta of my dreams and then… the cradle of chicory coffee cream beignets on the beam cotton in the seam of pockets lined with those dreams deferred not yet exploded not yet exposed in these lyrics that rhyme with time. They flow they row and so we go low into the glow gloaming, roaming, knowing what we know.

About the Author

Mark Hammerschick

Mark Hammerschick is a poet based in the Chicago area and has a BA in English from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a BS and MBA. His poetry is also forthcoming in The Metaworker and Breadcrumbs Magazine.