All night (when isn’t it night?) the flat fields sleep unsound,
the megacities spit and thrum with their overdrive generators,
babies shawled in naked terror howl for 24-hour shifts in test chambers.
Earth is round the way a cattle prod is round.
Electricity churns and spits, sprinting through Hell World, block after block.
I bet if we could fly, our warden would just lift up the sky a little higher
because the Earth is shaped like a baton or a cattle prod,
the glowing voltaic end powered by every lost housepet’s blood and tears.
In my dreams I break out of orbit and see a gallows sleeping on the moon.
Even at this altitude, a million hands compress my life with dream pressure,
convert all the champagne pops and severance pay into little diamond coal shards.
It’s midnight in Hell World and the sky around the stars is black leather.
The whole universe is a cop-hand that always puts the squeeze on me;
there’s a camera in my mind, monitoring dreams. Inspect any border: razorwire.
It could be bright daylight and the world would still encircle us in riot gear.
But we never get daylight down here. It’s always 2 AM and the flat fields
absorb the troubled sleep of all labored peoples in the restless dark.
Zack Carson is a poet and musician from Asheville NC, currently working toward an MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work has been (or will be) published in The Shore, Soundings East, All Existing, and Inscape.
Euphony Journal 