S.C. Flynn: ‘Regret’ and ‘Obelisks’

REGRET

Counting broken windows in a ruined city
where hopes are corpses with outstretched hands.

Strong arms holding your head under water
until you accept mortality’s truth.

Even smiles are doomed to atrocity:
sunlight gleaming on a murderer’s shoulder.

You will never sleep again; dreams are censored
and you will never remember who shared them.

A vast wasteland without signposts,
a symphony of denunciation.

OBELISKS

All the pills you’ve taken form an avenue,
a row of neurotransmitting megaliths
towering over you as you crouch,
a tiny atlas, under their weight.
Inside their hard, shiny surfaces
lie other lives waiting to be freed,
but you will never have the chisel;
the rounded end of each is an egg
with fear inside pecking at the shell
to reveal a penetrating eye.
Then it’s time again to grasp on tight
to another dissolving zeppelin,
soaring and diving in drone vision until
gravitational collapse
punches a vortex
that swallows self, world and everything.