Sign up to EliteSkills

The Poem


Was found compacted and spoke of ignorance:
Two sheets of torn, unlined notebook paper, crumpled,
Covered in motor oil, red dirt and sand.
Each page had tiny, slanted, cramped writing, and
Was ploughed into a massive county landfill.
The verses told of life, death and other special things.
A porcelain and a marble bowl were singly filled
With either endings or beginnings
And required the reader to make a choice.

Some would listen to the steel green
Of the ancient, tainted, drowning ocean
Every brilliant, ferocious night,
While others would explore the pastel morning colors
And pierce the red eye of the present
With a blind, silver needle.
Old ghosts haunted webbed, broken windows,
Asking if angels or purple flowers could bleed.

The first and only blazing fever had passed through very long ago,
Assuring the heat necessary for the creation of the universe.
As questioning people beat back the flames,
Life was found in the smoke.

But now, the god of concrete had blocked
The flow of rivers
And covered the earth in thick layers.
Many had forgotten that water had been for drinking,
And the blanket of thin air was only
What we had made it to be,
As if Nature were the private property of man.

The remainder of all things not human
May now gather to find
The end of something resembling forever
As we conceive of it.
Remember that eternity lies about its beginning and also about its end.


D.W. Boyles
February 04, 2010