Lines Engraved on a Desk

Is Stalin relevant today,
when the populace revolts
against the world's decision maker,
we insulated Americans,
in agonistic encounters over
blind ideologies and
cultural suppression?

Should they all be taken at night,
carted off to Siberian camps
where cold labor numbs the will
to live, and fights erupt over
a single rotten beet when
the kasha is poured thin?

Do people buried in mass graves
share the last eternal dream
in one version of after life,
not heaven, but a commune
where captured particles and atoms
reacquaint themselves into one sun?

For what reason do we quarrel
over our nascent religions
that divided from the same egg,
nurtured in the same womb,
expelled by identical pains
on the eve of execution day?



Transient Alley

It reeks of wasted dreams,
and the death of rotted leaves,
of putrid false breaths,
rolled by hands that long since left,
consumed by clear spiced fire,
distilled for eyes of a pariah,
who wipes with images
of women's false fashion,
and laughs at arms lined
with tracks of injection,
while sitting in wasted spittle
and desires one will forsake,
pondering where to purloin
the next spurious escape.


S.P. Flannery was born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and now resides in Madison where he writes poetry and maintains a website he created about primates called "The Primata" at http://members.tripod.com/cacajao/. His poetry has appeared in Mobius, Hummingbird, Avocet, Sidereality, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, Lily, Spillway Review, Malleable Jangle, Electric Acorn, Free Verse, and Plum Ruby Review. He also has poetry forthcoming in The Neovictorian/ Cochlea, Fifth Street Review, and Poetry Salzburg Review.