Eclipse


This bifurcation of a mood,
hulking stone-cropped symbol,
bedazzles sulking sensual
lilac beauties. Enormous
prurience, implacably
untamed (and here we crystallize
our disenfranchised name): amused,
the poet summarizes yellowed notes,
exploits winter’s nudity
with summertime’s misquotes, dangling,
mangling, jangling out of tune—a systematic
eulogy for autumn’s ochre moon.

Cunning sedentary statuaries restrain resplendent vestiges,
shadow angry troubadors’ scraggly cavalcades:

                                   ABC in the house;
                                   Reacher warehouse tracking
                                   17 hours. Come to us:
                                   Thursday +
                                   See-more Jane =
                                   proud of self nervous
                                   500 taut screws.

               Scoff at their curses, they’ll take you away.
               Linger too long, they’ll congeal your soul
               at the one-eyed ogre’s matinee.

The eclipse prompted the warden to
circulate a memo prisonwide
warning

Don’t Look at it it
Can Ruin Your Eyes.


I sent a memo back
to the warden:

This Life Sentence Ain’t
Doin Much for
Me Either.



Politics

Every day is
a self-

contained universe
defined
by enigmatic

variables entwined
perhaps with antecedents
but singularly representative

in the record
of our allotment.

Republican
& Democrat
​mean nothing

to me:
they foster
fixed ideologies

conveniently ignoring
cosmic restlessness
& ill temperament

toward 
the static:
there's no redemption

in
howling winds.
In-

dependence recognizes 
the conditional unanchored 
by the conventional.

Literati

I am a product of the modern machine.
I do not care for archaic blatherings,
cheesy croonings, syrupy obsecrations or
               (for that matter)
anything shit from the dusty minds and
crusty quills of yesteryear's versifiers.


Emerson, Whitman, Whittier,
each progressively shittier,
their lines murder by tedium.


Dickinson and Poe
defend that black, bleak, broad-whiskered era:

   dark souls,
   lonely souls,
slung off and faded away:

            
             The greatest among us
             pen magnificent fascinations go mad and die young.


I do not care for old lickers and their vacuous
psalms. Ripe is a step removed from rotten, age an achievement unworthy of immortality.


I do not care for bygone philosophies that humanize
inanimates, caricaturize the humble struggle.


John Corley writes from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola where he has served 29 years of a life sentence.
He is a recipient of the PEN award for playwriting and a National Council on Crime and Delinquency award for journalism. 
His first poetry collection, Pagan, was released in 2018. ​