Poetry

Sirens (1)

The hospital would eat every part of him
but it started with the eyes,
sowing iris planes with orange salty brick
until it rested like a native.
Turning blue into a ceaseless beast
where inside, everything was law.
Heart rates, palpitations, seizures and blood pressure
became life architects,
before it was wooden hands on steering wheel.
A distance he would gladly call happiness.
Feeling the building scuttling around skull
he held back tears of hot embalming amber,
it wouldn’t be enough to wash the feet of the boy.

The edifice came to life like a Polaroid,
walked around and settled in a chamber,
reading magazines and feeding intravenously.
Following into even smaller rooms.

Sirens (2)

Her breath felt like the ghost of an ambulance,
the rubble of an idea that was trying to cling.
He wanted to scoop up the hot orange brick
and mould cathedrals that screamed at sterile skies,
that pushed at forever until lungs collapsed
and tore into tomorrow like the afterthoughts of warm spasm.
He cast out the duvet and felt his skin bleach against the horizon
as she lay on their stretcher, preserved as plastic, mermaid like,
more noble than blue hymns or boats.
He thought of a kiss so thick you could sit a spoon in it.
An anchor that mocked cold brittle water.
A moment before the whistling sirens rocked him to sleep,
where he could touch her breath like an animal again.
Instead her song led him back to bed
where he salvaged masts and oars for firewood,
but prayed for beeswax. 

Lewis Haubus