Steven Fortune
Sleight of Mouth
Hallowed Empathy,
you hold my Dead Man’s Hand
so jealously;
who lingers to imbue the lost cause?
All the moving parts
assume positions old;
the game restarts.
Who loads your deck with these inane draws?
I’m a simple man;
the role of butter in
a frying pan.
A ground of flaming ice; a warped loop.
Dreaming out of breath,
I seek asylum from
the rhyme of death,
but there’s a magnet in the mind’s hoop.
Chatter from beyond
the arm impedes at times
it should abscond
to heaths between betrayal and faint praise.
Splatters in the pond
of feral waves erupt;
Nirvana’s bond
is shattered by the stones of old ways.
Easy was the self-
admonishment until
the shedding shelf
was robbed of all de-filtering tools.
Growth, then overgrowth,
to nullify the self-
policing oath.
So much for truth in cellophane schools.
Prodigal mistakes
unpack the base around
the current stakes
in rehabilitation’s long game.
Ghoster rendered ghost,
I gulp more than my share,
while those who most
contributed to me evade blame.
Ignorance is bliss
when recollection feigns
attentiveness;
it takes one to know one who’s not, too.
Maybe I’d forget
were I not tethered to
the epithet
of ghosts beholden to the last screw.
Like a sleek guru
of marketing, I know
you more than you:
for hidden prejudices, hold tight.
Then the empathy
will spill your guts when it
plugs into me
for power of a shadowing light.
I’m inclined to think
my eyes are closest to
the dire brink
of sense-eviscerating scar wars.
Every time I see
someone who’s ever long
forgotten me,
I know, for Empathy keeps all scores.
I’ve forgotten more
about old lightning rods
of child lore
than they could ever know or care to.
I’m the diaries
they threw away to live,
laugh, and appease
the roots adulthood wouldn’t dare to.
Some in fact, need not
appease a thing: the lot
conceived in rot.
Must I reiterate I know all?
Good and bad, they come
and go, to cancel out
beneath your hum.
Why must you, Empathy, have last call?
I’d chew off my feet
to expedite a crawl
off Dead Man’s Street
and take this heartbeat as a high gift.
But a record I
am more, of ev’ryone
who’s passed me by,
and punctured Hera’s groove with Zeus’ rift.