Of all the red apples

Of all the red apples

Of all the red apples, rotten and ashen in moonlight, collecting memories off the grass,
there was one that stared up at the velvet sky, wondrous and unaware.
Ripe, crimson as angel blood,
dripping with nothing he could remember.
To clasp to his breast as memory.

Of all the king’s men, none seemed awake.
Riding stallion after stallion over
mountains of rusted iron in the night;
quiet as steel before the anvil wakes.
None, except the king in wait of gold.

Of all the lions feasting on a gazelle,
The yellow rectangle of NatGeo,
stared at the empty couch in front; the one
the feast was for. A mother-less starving cub lay beside,
steadily out of frame. Till flies hovered over him by the first rays.

The opal eye, stone like torn pages, his wrinkled skin moved
towards the button.
With the buzzer, appeared a door.
Stumbling over the broken ledge,
he fell his fall
and slept like the baby who never tore pages.

As white- noise filled the darkened room with the hum
of the television, the montage swerved to the city lights,
concrete luncheons and soliloquies dancing,
like petals in the first rain, proud like an unseen blood-stain,
a crouching tiger by the curb with no vein to lust the pain.

Of all the red apples, one was born with a crease.
With no one to devour his flesh and bone, he rolled down
the mildew and pebbles, rolling the hill around him like
a blanket, till the rot and halt.