Variations on a Theme
—a poem by Scott Thomas Outlar

She covers my grave in roses.
She stuffs my mouth with thorns.
She calls forth acid rain
to drench the cemetery plot
where I am reborn as a zombie.

I am the Nothing Man.
I am the New Wave.
I am the Renaissance,
birthed anew with the eyes of a Beast,
the heart of a dying world,
the mind of a black tumor,
the spirit of a raging fire,
and the final truth of a flailing supernova.

I am the essence of morphine
dripping into the splintered veins
of a body where the lungs no longer breathe.

I am the Police State cancer
flooding over a primal riot
as the stitches fall out
and pent up frustration bursts at the seams.

I am the Amazon,
cut off at the knees,
starving for a new harvest,
spitting out the last lungful of oxygen.

I am the image of tomorrow
hauntingly cast through a cracked crystal ball,
drowning the wasteland with silent chaos.

I am the muscle that has atrophied.
I am the kidney that no longer flushes.
I am the liver that has evolved into a leech.
I am the mutation of a thousand mistakes.


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Scott Thomas Outlar hosts the site 17Numa.wordpress.com where links to his published poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews can be found. His chapbook Songs of a Dissident (Transcendent Zero Press) was released in 2015 and is available on Amazon. His poetry collections Happy Hour Hallelujah (CTU Publishing) and Chaos Songs (Longsword Press) are both forthcoming in 2016.