“Large hailstones were hurled against him; like onrushing turtles”

—Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth

 

On a good day I am not treating my death with dying.

Bad days, the bath keeps rising, spilling hot

over hallway floors. A thousand turtles splash

 

and scuttle around me, their identical

thousand-year stares form a moving carpet

of autumn greens and browns. These colors

 

may not be exactly true, my recall is a shell

that fades as gin takes the edge off my Percocet.

The cosmos spins turtles all the way down

 

to my chemical stain on the floor and I die again

when memories of me subside. The earth boils

with burn-off from forever slicks, and in every house,

 

the sound of falling men and women. Like all

intentions, the good turtles look the same as the bad

and I set this problem to music played by my thousand

 

lyres-in-waiting. No one’s left to hear me surrounded

by so many loose-necked reptiles sculling

the hall like a cold lava flow. My armor hardens

 

when they abandon good and bad ideas in the hallway

and leave as happiness always does – a thousand

slow homes moving west where it’s cooler.

 

 

 

 

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TED MICO began his writing career in London as a features editor at the weekly music paper Melody Maker. His poetry has recently been featured in High Window Press, Ilanot Review, Lumina, Slipstream, Arboreal, T’Art, Cordite Review, Blood & Bourbon, and elsewhere. He’s edited three books of non-fiction and is a regular at the legendary Beyond Baroque poetry workshop in Venice, California.

 

 

The art that appears alongside this piece is “Splinter Installation, detail shot” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.