Sunday, January 28, 2007

Poetry by Leopold McGinnis

Modern Art

Gone are the days
Of artists and easel
Amongst treetops and seagulls
These artists hide in caves
Spilling abstractions
From paint cans
Using photographs
For models
Of a world they’ll
Never see.


Revenge of the Mouse

He watched a mouse die
on the busy sidewalk corner
of a skyscraper downtown
Heaving, staring up at him
with eyes as black as space
breathing slower and slower
- some sort of respiratory problem -
easing into the pavement until…
the spark was gone

And he thought he’d kill himself
if death wasn’t even more pathetic and insignificant
than life - he thought,
if he could grow to a thousand feet tall
he’d trample this city
and all its ugly people underfoot
Take a dump on its national monuments
Piss in the water
and crush the earth between his fingers
like clay, Laugh! Laugh!

Then he’d blast off into the furthest reaches of space
Finding brave new civilizations and extinguishing them
one by one,
The greens ones, the red ones, the purple ones
before gathering up the debris
to make a gun the weight
of fifty black holes
dense enough, powerful enough
big enough to wipe out
the universe in one
single
shot

And then he’d bite down on the metal muzzle
pull back the trigger
and spray his grey-matter
across the dark-matter

leave a universe of colored memories
rotting in the vacuum
of nothingness
the red ones, the green ones
the monuments and the mouse.




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