Poetry

By

Heath Brougher

Your Ascendancy

Forgive me, your Ascendancy, for being less than servile.

For stepping aside the pile of gutted people at your feet,

for using your name in vain spraying cuss across the streets,

for seeing through your charade into the dusty hollow pit of your heart.

Forgive me, your Ascendancy, for not drinking from the chalice of stolen oil

held forth by your bloodstained hands.

Forgive me, your Ascendancy, for the nausea, for the wilted aura

of your shifty eyes ripe with disease.

Excuse the bile-filled vomit that poured from my gaping mouth

as you calmly [yet sinisterly] proclaimed your essence and intentions

to be innocuous, in our best interest, the peoples’ best interest.

[compassion lay dead impaled on the white picket fences of suburbia]

Please forgive me, your Ascendancy, for my repulsion and fury at your mass murder,

your desert slaughterhouse. Forgive me for wincing at the luminous glare

of teeming light bulbs cast from your golden throne.

Forgive me, your Ascendancy, for raging against the avaricious whispers

you pass into the ears of your evil-eyed cronies with such apathetic demeanor.

Whispers full of power but not a trifle of harmony or empathy.

Whispers from the mouth of a genocidal maniac, thoughtless and conceited,

a million miles away from anything resembling peace

Slumber

Most people

think of

the American Dream

but I dream

of the American Awakening.

Heath Brougher

I live in York, PA and attended Temple University. When not writing I help with the charity Paws Soup Kitchen which gives out free dog/cat food to low income families with pets. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in both print and online journals such as Yellow Chair Review, Dissident Voice, Mobius, Main Street Rag, *82 Review, Epigraph, Of/with, Maudlin House, Gold Dust, Harbinger Asylum, Mad Swirl, Red Fez, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and elsewhere.