A Gray Vacation

That bone-rot hand
Wrapped in mummy’s rags
Clutching at your shoulder,
That chill breath you felt
On your neck,

It blew out your candle.
You saw it float across
The blackened room,
You saw its rat’s whiskers,
Or were those just the strings

Holding you here?
You watched it take your cheeks
And put them in its pocket,
You felt it stroke your arm
With its dried-butterfly hands.


*

The grey man impatiently
Wiping flies from his mouth,
The ghost train howling,
Its single hollow whistle
Bisecting the orange field.

She’s crying, that woman
Clutching her newborn.
Isn’t she too young
To be doing that?

There should be laws
Against such macabre spectacles,
Replies the ventriloquist
With Hamlet’s skull as his dummy.

*

The wailing and the stoic,
But you will not notice them,
So wrapped up in the neon tubes
Humming orange through hell’s windows.

You will be jostled through like sightseers
In a carnival, cattle in a neat bloody line.
It’s warm down here, and you will make
To remove your jacket, forgetting you traded it
To some chap for some wings of melted wax.

Pity will keep you rooted to this spot,
Watching as your black-hooded
Tour guides motion to Beelzabub’s
Hanging gardens. Scraps of yellowed parchment
Hang from bronze sconces. Dried butterflies flutter
In the evening breezes.