Thursday, February 23, 2023

Peter Panic

 Peter Panic


  1. The Downward Spiral


His world was an illusion of boxes. 

He wondered how they could make it real.

He couldn’t wake up from his dream.

How could he make it real?

They hide their memories in boxes.

Top enclosures. Coffins for parents.

And he washes Her to dust

The way a hand slides through pages

And we become what we used to be


They learn to fear the reaper

Remembering a visit from Peter Pan

Yet matter plays its rapture in wormy dirt


It’s midday. The heavens have collapsed.

This enclosure no longer satisfies. She feeds

Her regrets to Her boy and what She would do differently

Given another chance.


Who will come to Her window now?
A goat man with the head of a snake

extends his hand and convinces Her

That She can fly


but when She tries

the cold call of gravity

lures Her down

into that place

inhabited by the broken shards

of starry heaven


  1. Possession


There was no man behind that mask.

They said his eyes felt like a reptile’s.

His drooling rictus always seemed to need

It always seemed like he was kneeling

Haunted over, especially after Her death.

Only pretty sure that he bring Her back again.


Repulsion begets compulsion. We were strangers

To that inner world. And we anthropomorphized you.

There’s a freakish simplicity to faking a smile

And we’ll smile too, just to make you stop looking

It is an architecture of plastic. A domain for shapes.


i can be anyone you please.

i am the new face

But I’ll always be Her boy

when you look in the mirror,

it is my eyes that stare back

i've been given so many names

that i've forgotten what i call myself

do not believe that you are ever alone

in shadows, in darkness, in the deepest pit

there are voices, like echoes

in search of mouths

to make their own.


  1. The Necromancer


that boy would look at us

see nothing but phantoms

blips in the radar

of his imagination

haunting about him

immaterial, impossible

to touch.


when he began to fear us

we began to fear him.

we sensed his eyes

did not see us as human.


deeply paperlike kisses

blowing ashes in the wind

and then he would whisper

his torrential teleology

to the tinman, an alchemist

a shell of a man

a moribund effigy

awaiting translation

in the moisture

of his undead mother


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