Five Poems by Heath Brougher

 

 

To Forget the Past  

  

Long ago the center collapsed. 

The gyre, still turning, is tantamount to Maya— 

the eminence front, the false mason  

of catalyzing illusions. 

 

On the basis daily 

the sleepy sheepfold swallow  

their pill-less pills. 

 

The herd loves and lifts, 

on praise-high shoulders, 

the invisible fences and walls 

running through the corporeal cranium 

of their nonexistent existence. 

  

A global population of insanitised humans 

unknowingly unliving their uncatalyzed lives— 

paralyzed and incapable and unwilling and fast asleep. 

   

They should check their pulse every so often. 

It might facilitate the opening of an eyelid 

or the firing of a neuron with some integrity. 

 

 

 

 

Poem About Insane People   

 

I have named each bird to be shot  

out of the sky by bored foxhunters  

with gunpowder for single-ball pellets. 

The creatures of the sky fall dead  

upon wooden grass where they decompose  

to quartz bones strewn among 

the simultaneity of synchronized  

yet chaotic woodland. 

 

 

 

 

My New Ultimatum  

 

I used to be 

a giver but now 

I never want to 

give Up. 

 

You can no longer 

have my Up. 

But since I will never 

end because I 

never began 

I will give  

to you your  

fabled eternity. 

 

But not my Up.  

 

 

 

 

Fascism Arrives in Earnst  

 

Left and right Wokery  

have masqueraded into  

the minds of the world— 

whether dressed as a weakness 

or viciousness—the people are too 

infatuated—lost in realms of Rote thinking 

to notice the blatant Fascism  

on both sides of their closed- 

minded thoughts.  

 

Censorship and violence. 

Madmen on both sides of the fence.  

And god forbid you don’t  

choose a side—else the woke right  

will kill you while the woke left  

will cancel you for causing them  

to feel mildly upset.  

 

“the best lack all conviction while the worst  

are filled with passionate intensity” 

—Yeats knew the score. 

 

Awaken up! 

Stop idolizing the behaviour  

of a 5-year-old cult leader 

and learn to take a bit of pain every so often! 

 

I don’t like feeling like I’m  

the last sane person on the planet. 

 

 

 

 

Seeing the Worst 

 

Ghost eggs mixed  

with angel bones, wrapped  

in the wooden arms of tree branches  

leaning away from the poisonous personified wires  

    emanating noxious pulsations 

   among the legacy of the disgusting grandiloquence  

 of humanity's bright neon blight.

Heath Brougher is the editor-in-chief of Concrete Mist Press. He was the recipient of the 2018 Poet of the Year Award and is a multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. He has authored twelve books, the most recent of which is “Beware the Bourgeois Doomsday Fantasy” (Sandy Press, 2024). 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

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