“I WAKE UP SCREAMING” – “DEMONOLOGY”

I Wake Up Screaming

Down in the basement, a summer intern was sorting through your organs and dictating her findings into her cell phone. This might have been more endurable if you weren’t still half-awake, pondering the holes in dream logic. Meanwhile, I was undergoing my own conversion experience. One agent had gripped me by the arm, and another gave me a shove from behind, and they started to march me toward the black SUV with tinted windows idling at the curb. Years passed in an instant. I was somewhere where meat falls easily off the bone and a modicum of darkness spurts out with every broken heartbeat. 

Demonology

Death has one eye in its heart and rolls like a ball to get where it is going – even closer to us. Demons march before it. Some of them are covered in scales, some in matted hides. Many others are ghosts, restless spirits of the dead, especially of those who died violently or were not properly buried. They are more numerous than humans. Each person has a thousand on the right and ten thousand on the left. If you saw them, you could not endure the sight. They visit graves and devastated places and want to unzip the body bags.

— Howie Good’s newest poetry collection, Heart-Shaped Hole, which also includes examples of his handmade collages, is forthcoming from Laughing Ronin Press.

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