Issue 7
June 2001
Mike Wiegand
Mike Wiegand is a former attorney (now fully recovered) who works in Seattle, Washington as an executive speechwriter and business communications writer. He has previously published poetry, short stories, and non-fiction. He is married and has two children, and his interests include weight-training, jazz and the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibula.
All work © Mike Wiegand
Look Before We Turned
She used to get this look before we turned
The lights off for the night. She'd burned out like
A match and softly slept, the peace she yearned
For every day would find her tortured psyche.
I'd read my book and feel her warmth, and stare
At her and worry. Then she'd barely stir,
And, looking up, would smile without a care--
Exquisite in her sweetness. Slowly her
Untroubled eyes would close again, that smile
Still faintly there. I'd kiss her cheek and cry
Because such peace came just once in a while,
And with each day I watched the sweetness die.
If only I could have just kept her there.
If only I could have just left her there.
Denialogue of the Zombie
She is see, feel, think, breathe, dream,
wake over, ache over, keel over
Must do this known too well,
down dark and deep
where secrets can’t be kept from myself
Down there in the midnight greasy glitter-palace of ghosts
and casks of Amantillado
worse than her raging overflowing insecurities
and schools of feeding-frenzied saber-tooth cruelties is
this stale still-life without her
Now in this strange estranged unreal estate
Ground Zero. Like death in every way
except the painlessness and actual smell
I could not walk less in the land of the living
if I were shot naked into deep space
For her it is a victory ground
although don’t know can’t know
knowing only that she is
deaf to desperation,
heedless to tearfulness and suffering
and senseless bawling and dumb persistence
Waiting like a spinster for the phone to scream
Governor on line-one with commutation
30-seconds before the switch is thrown
There are a lot of half-minutes in a night
Waiting tonight then tomorrow night
and for weeks of extended rigor mortis
then months, years, decades, centuries
There will be no call at all
here at the morgue
but the pain will faithfully
keep its appointed rounds
of ammunition blasted
right through my raw heart
haplessly staring
at splintered ribs and shredded flesh
protruding from this F. Scott Fitzgerald sternum
as the blood rhythmically spurts out
in metronomically correct intervals
Not a bad fate
unless it’s a happy ending you’re after
after your ending
One Migration
A fish's way of apprehending, this
Swimming upstream, nothing dreamed, nothing wished
Nothing judged. Just this, the rapids streaming
By, time streaming by with a swirling hiss.Swimming without thinking, without seeming
To move, almost motionless, a gleaming
Light-flooded equipoise, whispering trance;
Thoughtless, never asking what redeeming
Value here, no why, wherefore--only chance
Changes in light, slight shifts in flow, a glance
Through bubbling, boiling foam at things ahead:
A swirling, hissing, chaotic expanse.
No inclination toward remorse or dread.
No agonizing where the course has lead.
No protestations that all must be said.
No aggrandizing being, live or dead.