Christopher R. Kennedy

Wouldn’t it be strange to meet a psychopath
Stand three feet from his demonic skull
And stare into his sunken eyes which
You know must crinkle with warmth
...

Earthy brown, thick fingers
That seem to have sprang
From a cliff side’s red clay
Handle the petals and stems
...

Amethyst eyes of petrified light
Shine through the silky darkness like
A flashlight through a bedsheet
Moon beams lick the sky where purple cloud
...

Between beams of soggy sun,
Streaked by the shades of weeping gray trees,
And trapped between walls of ice-cold mud and
Gray grass and twigs like green, jagged skeletons,
...

I see him stand in streetlight rays.
He shivers from the dark.
Every night he shakes hands
With the incoming night.
...

Before I’d call it morning
But past the point I’d call it night
Every day I wake from murky dreams
To an impatient alarm’s clock’s scream
...

Enormous shrubs adorned with candy roses
That stretch from left to right like
The horizon
...

I confess I play with matches
I stash them under the fattest pillows
Still they never bloom with yellow fire
For I prefer to count them with an enormous finger
...

We’re all Honey Nut cheerios in a grand bowl of skim milk
An ocean of whiteness that stretches to the horizon
Gray sky black trees red people and this white ocean
That stretches to the horizon
...

Somber flames dance on their wicks
Which are coated with ashen ice
They bend their legs and
Tug on the blanketed dusk just as the
...

Early evening:

A sailboat drifts across the lake
Like a solitary puff of cloud
...

As the sweet rain smears the watercolor world
And the beams of sunshine are stirred into it
As the trees ripple and splash around me
And my knees melt into the ground
...

White glasses glinting through chocolatey darkness
Skeletal fingers wrapped hurriedly in aged duct tape
Calf muscles like Fed-Ex packages nailed to your legs
Man with top hat, relinquish to me your bead necklace
...

People are the clay of the world around them—the potter
They are made to be molded and shaped by muddy red fingers
That look as though they grew out of the Cliffside
People are not just creatures with blood and organs, made of cells
...

When I submit to night

I wake up in lands so foreign and so strange
I hardly know myself
...

Such blue eyes, you angel,
Girl with hair of flowing sunbeams
That splash onto your tiny shoulders
Like a waterfall of liquid gold
...

Where the sunlight comes down in crystals
Against a sky that ought not be so blue
Mourners group like penguins
In expensive clothes of briefcase-black.
...

You know that sound you hear
When the lake is as black as ink
And flawless like glass
When a leaf floats down like
...

It must be nice to be a shadow
A solid form of silky black
Stamped onto a moonlit street
Or dancing below trees outlined in gold
...

Cigarette smoke clings to his teeth
His last rhyme’s scent lingers
On his red-purple tongue
He uses Crest toothpaste
...