The Butcher Of Colours

I am painted eclipse black

My soul’s paling colours

Sucked, swilled and spat

In a bloodletting coup

Scarlet letter inked

In brushfire cheeked shame

This heady thirst and wretched hunt for light

Martyring sallow sheeted flesh

Like droughty dandelion beds

Matchless against a slaying sun,

The butcher of colours

Executes a swivel-eyed stampede

Evicting coma drunken wishes

And shaken stowaway dreams

Dragging my wilted anemone feet

Through the salt eaten corpse

Of bedeviled black seas

To pickle this imprisoned skin

In mummified reptilian sheath,

And I am bruised and slit necked reed

Swaying through opiate hushed calm

Singing the piper’s death march hymns

Beneath a hanging noose moon

Over ivory legged cloud,

Yet I have eaten up nightshade’s bitter spillover fill

And toasted my ghosts a vagrant’s farewell

And I will devour the towers of hooked black vulture rains

To steal back my colours

From death’s blitzkrieg of fangs.