Radiation in my beggar’s
Bones all lit up
By a lantern flame
Flickering like a firefly
In a canning jar.
I stand around the ash can
To warm my hands.
Sipping bitter coffee
Waiting in red ragged flannels
A shiver cuts through an old alcoholic
Outstretched hand
Rich with my new round of rye.
Don’t worry this
Helps with integrity
Believe in the beams
Words like Fractionated
And decisions like tattoos
Are stolen from real
Life I’m in a propaganda
Movie. Before the main
Attraction. But it’s all fiction.
10 laser beams on the spine
Just leave me alone eaten alive inside
I never knew such exhaustion existed.
Offers of investigational risks,
I fall again
Crumpled under the criteria.
Unfit for trial,
Back to the war on cancer
I turn everybody over to
Real criminals
The 8mm films of
Nagasaki and Okinawa
Bikini atoll
White Sands desert observers
All turned inside out
Dying of cancer
Years after the
Photographs turned
To negatives
Where the darkness
Reigned supreme.
Is this only a stomach ache
Does my headache
Mean anything to
Those pictures
A science of an
In exact nature
Looking for snowballs
In hell.
No scarring and burning
It’s deep and linear Acceleration radiation
But upon waking up from
A dream I scream
Silently as the fallout
Covers statues with
Dirty with wakefulness
Interrupted by exhaustion
Dropping me into a dream
And my beggar’s bones
Standing around the ashcan
Where all the incarcerated burn.