Darkness and Dirty Diners and the Midnight Host Serving Up Death as
the Poetry Weeps Into Its Day Old Coffee, Cold as a Corpse

These dense and hollow bones
and bland flesh that you’ve gifted me
are as empty as the silence within words
without teeth, and limp as the thin blue
veins sucked dry and left bloodless in a
mouth full of ghosts

speaking while saying nothing at all
but only choking on their own wounds
and I am uninterested in

trying to save them, this corpse,
these words lacking substance,
unseasoned and unripe in their
decay of meatless betrayals, tasteless
filters that leave me fed yet hungered still

8/17/2015 ©Debbie Berk