Christopher Barnes-

Strapped

 

Unfetted power

Is not drawled,

Cryptic as sanctioned.  Liar dice have sounded –

Nowadays you’re ‘The Appellant’

In this fixture of the departed.

A flash squirms copper cables.

Grimness summons its ghosts;

Duress evaporates

As light knocks-for-six the eye.

 

(from the Electric Chair poems)

 

Unpardonable

 

From corpse to executioner

Sparks are zeroed, skirting the brain

Across the eyeball, hanging the gut.

 

Subject?  Life-ditching by legal prod.

Who does this hoodlum have a conviction to be?

Bundy?  Boston strangler?

 

Merciless barb-pixels strike.

The screen stamps itself

Into a lachrymal nerve,

Shivers.

 

(from the Electric Chair poems)

 

 Bird

 

As the eye fathoms

Lumpishness has vanquished;

Down aisle to lock-up

You’ll stomp no more.

 

The stir of disintegration,

Bodied in the black-out

Will knot, fizzling out

The unanswerable sparks

In a singed brain.

 

Bessie Smith’s bawl

‘Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair’

And this Google portrait

Will survive.

 

(from the Electric Chair poems)

 

Christopher Barnes' first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer Press.  He is a participant for www.stemistry.com and has just had an art review published by Peels Magazine, UK