"Skim," "People," and "The Return of Sound"
Skim
Your children are stones
who have skimmed the sun
who have been born into a world
where the toxicities have skinned the ozone
the sun skims across their faces everyday
razing red-hot and cancerous skin
in time all the stones will turn black
and melt away like Icararuswings.
People
People are people are made of people
like they’re supposed to be made of
people with peopleskin and peopleheart
[can turn dark and black sometimes
like a lump of coal what with these
endless wars and mass genocides]
made purely of peoplequality [usually shoddy]
with their peoplelives and peopleperceptions
and peoplebrains communicating with the other people.
The Return of Sound
Neutrino heavy gulp of heavenly hesitation
inadvertently switches on
an octogenarian's hearing aid
which has been hashtag stashed
in the oven until today. Unfiltered
sound waves suddenly suck in
the noise, the chitchat of the church
and subway train simultaneously
showing through ataxic sound skinflints
of various voices and all albums
from here to Allentown where the apathy
can be heard in the voices.
Shaggy memories heard through dust
remind him how nothing has changed
and Mankind is still a bunch
of silly monkeys with lucky thumbs.

Heath Brougher has published 3 chapbooks, A Curmudgeon is Born (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), Digging for Fire, and Your Noisy Eyes (both published by Stay Weird and Keep Writing Press, 2017) as well as one full length, About Consciousness, (Alien Buddha Press, 2017). He is a Best of the Net Nominee and is the co-poetry editor of Into the Void Magazine which won the 2017 Saboteur Award for Best Magazine. His work has appeared in Of/with, Chiron Review, Brave New Word, First Literary Review-East, Word For/Word, BlazeVOX, and elsewhere.