The Black Angel Poem by Ron Poetry

The Black Angel

The black angel in my blood tells me it's time to die, go, disappear from myself into the next loveless oblivion like rainwater down a snake's hole. The black angel in my heart laughs and reminds me how worthless I am to any of these who keep dying like rivers in a desert everytime I look to see if there's anything real to drink behind the mirage of their smiles. Look how they all salt their own gardens, killing anything green that had a chance to grow with their incessant no to anything that isn't a straitjacket they ripped off one of their mental dolls. My heart says die, my heart, too hurt to cry on anymore fires, says die and be done with all these shifting sands and lies that look like life but turn out to be nothing more than nothing more, black match heads trying to bloom in the dark, extinct flowers cut off at the root of being by their own refusal to open.
PAGE TWO..
No is their own rejection; no is the mirror returning their own reflection like a passport at a border to a face that isn't enough to be admitted in, to cross the threshold, to enter, flowing, the sea. And yet they all say they want to know, want to be more than the adolescent outside the dollar-store, peering penniless through the window, over the monkey-bars of a baby buggy. My God, how they cheep in their shells at the chance of any real sky outside the cramped confines of their postered walls. But show up like a crack, show up looking anything like liberation and growth, and everyone chickens back into the coop, wingless and terrified in the shadow of the hawk high overhead riding the wind for the joy of it. Frauds and imposters, day-old dainties in a bakery-window singing lead in a choir of flies. And the demons within me scoff, the black angel comes forward out of the miscarried dream, carrying the dead child that gave its life to believe in them and asks me if I've had enough of their toxic ordinariness, their insistent tainting of the secret wells it took so long to divine on the moon with a broken water-wand. Idiot children peering out of the shattered windows of an abandoned orphanage like tiny eyeless idols waiting the return of a huge blind god that can't see to sign their creation. And it isn't judgment, it isn't any lack of compassion or understanding that wants to thaw their glass tears and heal the home-made tattoos that puncture their hearts with dirty needles of ink, it isn't feeling above or beyond them that turns the life-boat into a floating hearse crammed with moaning ghosts; it's watching them look for salvation among the sharks that devour them one by one in a frenzied graveyard of fins. Tonight, so alone, so dispirited, so uselessly empty, a suicidal clown in a tentful of humorless junkies, I weep into my own hands like a man trying to wash off his own face in the acids of a private hell so complete death is the only rumour of a messiah these black winds whisper in the ashes of everything I wanted to be. What's the use of love, what's the good that comes of wasting a lifetime learning to care, learning to give and killing yourself off to give more, giving away your eyes, your heart, soul, hands, blood, time, talent, until exhausted and immaculately impoverished you don't know what you've got left to give when everyone's smearing lipstick on their rectums and sewing their mouths shut so nothing real or true gets said when they tell you how much they appreciate the generosity of your death and ask for more before you're buried in their bull.
PAGE THREE
I listen and I listen and I listen with my ears and mind and heart until their small doomed stars are splinters of glass in my own eyes, their pain mine, their healing mine, their fate my own until the dagger's buried in the wound of my own being so deeply I alone am left to the business of dying over and over again in this solitude of regenerative hell where to ask for a dropp of blood in return, a touch, a smile, a last embrace, one word of genuine love to ease the fear of the passing is to be refused with honey and cunning, is to learn, bitterly that all you gave as a gift is taken in theft and fenced in the seedy pawnshops of their pedestrian greed. Look, there's my heart in a greasy window, over-priced, almost the cost of a new one with a guarantee, and there by the chipped plaster of a mantlepiece wolf howling at a nicotine moon, the soul I squandered like a sudden flashflood on a dry creekbed that said it was going nowhere.
TO BE CONTINUED....
Ron Poetry