Rob Plath

Incoming Nails

I sit here swinging my
scaly, pale hooks at the alphabet.

I look around & everything
in this little place
is human made,

from the laptop to the coffee machine.

I feel like I’ve awoken
to some cold, future alien world.

So I gaze through the window
at the tall trees standing out there,
thick bark bars of the prison cell
of amoral nature.

We’re fucked either way.

Have yr pick: the safe & the fake
or the unfostering & the brutal.

A lot of days I feel I am within
these thin walls,
my flesh ripped by the sharp points
of incoming nails,

but somehow it’s better than rubbing shoulders
w/the crowds of perfumed corpses walking the streets.

Those mobile corpses are much more brutal
than the trees.

Maybe I will go to the ocean.

I wonder if the waves possessed
consciousness they’d puke at their
endless monotonous hellish job.

I never make it to the ocean.

I stick w/the interior
of walls

the nails.

The modern iron maiden
we call home.

my soul flip flops

like a fish out of water

my soul, so to speak
flip flops
within my body
like a fish
out of water

birth caught
my soul w/its
nasty hook
& dragged me
from my
real environment

the black sea
of the abyss

now i writhe
within a shallow
bucket of a body

until death picks
me up & tosses
me back into the
beautiful black ocean