As Our Opuses Rot

[heslopian]

Self-expression is dead, like the woman we buried this morning.
After she'd fallen asleep one last time a rat stole her ring finger;
no ring had sat there for years, all metals having been claimed
to make bullets. The maddest of us paint in our own shit.
Soon I'll be signing my sonnets with piss; if I could hold on...
just long enough to finish this poem, if it is a poem,
and not just my journal chopped up, labelled "free verse",
because I can't remember meters or rhymes.
Those savages outside, eating their mothers as clouds join
and separate like commuters glimpsed from a train,
long ago, when trains were real things which arrived...
those savages... they're all that's left of the outer world now,
and they've probably fucked and killed in the trains.
When I was a boy I wrote my mother a poem -
she was tired a lot, cancer, I think, can't remember -
and it was about a man who spoke to monkeys.
A leaf drifted in from the garden, alighted on her shoulder
as she sat propped against the windowframe.
This war, if anyone still fights, hadn't been considered yet,
and art was thought good for kiddies like me.
Now we're lost in these underground tunnels, us kids,
us artists, we painters and poets (no novelists left;
they took all our ink), going mad as our opuses rot.

This poem takes place in the same universe as this one: http://pigpenpoetry.com/Thread-The-Savag...ht=savages