GRAVEYARD THOUGHTS

By Holly Rhiannon

This is the place of flies

I remind myself as a vibration breaks the stillness

The calm of the headstones

Carrion eaters know what lives beneath this soft earth

Decay and rot not visible on a freshly polished stone

My life has been a graveyard flower

Tentative bloom reaching for a light it will never touch

Roots coiled around a death

That sits in the pit of me

It’s coming

More so with every smile than every tear

Happiness feels stolen these days

Undeserved

Unexpected, it’s come

And I wait only for the inevitability of its passing

My hands travel to my pulse and my mind travels to far away

countries

Countries where my blood lives still, mixed with bullet casings

Do poets sit in the trench as I do by the graves?

There’s something to be said about

The futility of an artist without a war

But ours are incomparable

My flies are drawn to wine in a water bottle

Flowers pressed between paper

Food wrapped in wax

And I wonder if they prefer the intoxicating aroma of

decomposition

Carrion eaters will take what they can get

As will I, as I sit among the graves

Knowing that this is not yet my home

While the flies traverse strands of my hair, the root formation

of veins on my hand

With every step they whisper that I’ll be theirs soon

But until then I’ll fight my war upon the paper

#darkpoetsclub