Demon Hand

 

His cracked skin glows orange,

a pulsing ember,

eyes white and sunken in the black corner.

 

toenails that shard Indian Yellow

bone, brittle chitin exposed on toasted concrete,

bitter hair, wet from the dew and mud and clover

and wounds,

open and glistening and freshly pouting their

concerns via glossy, crimson madness.

 

The sulphurous ascent

rubs the scratchy bricks as the cottage exhales

to the clear night a

spoiled sooty breath of exhumed earth

and ghastly flesh.

 

The figure hunches,

blind in one swollen eye

and wets the floor with amnesiac piss and chatters

incoherently to a room full of people

who are not there.

 

He imagines choking whispers

and glitter in the lung.

 

He invents a tale

where a madman was drown by a village

and withered to a stick

and gutted sick

burned

disemboweled

chucked over the Starboard

and forgotten in the salty night.

 

A tale where a siren sings his gullet shut

and a mermaid smooths his skin

and a witch tallies her threads

and a swell of froth and jetsam,

malevolent and cursed

washes away all humanity

save a mythical yarn.

 

And his cracked skin grows pale,

a dying whale,

eyes white and sunken in the black corner.