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.