Bone Density
Les Wicks
Bone Density
I am becoming bored
with my pedestrian psychiatric disorders.
They are intellectual bunions,
a mild arthritis of the mind
& common as life.
A dollar-store desperado
most of my circumstances
are comfortable & tedious,
approaching bleak borders of normality.
I will change nothing
though I dream of the greater madnesses…
the hollow bones of a bird,
to be aflight,
those fledged edges of it all
but at the doorways of a fall.
Love can do it to you
loneliness too. In that signature hat
it’s entropy that’s the deep enemy.
There’s stories that the greatest art
awaits us at the bottom.
Reports come in that extraordinary exists.
It’s coded in the prayers that
are burnt in the cowled days of winter.
My friend suggested that we are both
the future & promise of our species.
But she’s just nuts.
The catalogues of extremity:
like the wino outside the GPO every day at 9
screaming for his important correspondence.
There’s the killers
more often imagined than real, reading
“Art of the Flense” while children are wrapped.
Some whisk their ideas,
conspiracies are baking in the oven.
Others change identities like they’re wearing
a cloak of living lizards.
My evil twin is smirking in the corner.
Blah blah he’s heard it all before.
Over 40 years Wicks has performed widely across the globe. Published in over 350 different magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 28 countries in 15 languages. Conducts workshops & runs Meuse Press which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry published on the surface of a river. His 14th book of poetry isBelief (Flying Islands, 2019).
The Elixir Magazine 