My Apparition’s Sedition

I brought a ghost home from the pet store.

They wouldn’t eat what I fed them,

never drank or needed bathed.

But they watched over my bed every night,

just hovering, shivering,

making ambient howls and eerie creaks

a soundtrack to my frozen dreams.

In the mornings, I led them round the sunrises on a leash of cloudy skies,

I built fires in volcano beds to warm their phantom chills.

And one day, under the blue harvest moonlight,

they told me their living will:

“I made the munitions for the mutiny,

I subsidized the swans’ sedition to steal back the icy sea.

But their trumpeting attacks only made Father Arctic rage;

he coughed out a polar vortex and flung it at my elegant swans–

on the dappled ground, their feathers mixed up with the skinniest snowflakes,

and I fled but couldn’t last in the cold, my season had come and gone.

I once was a wealthy sailor, but I got caught in a glacier,

so came the haunting death of your Mother Nature.”

***

If you enjoyed this poem, consider checking out my buy me a pizza, or this post about earth.