Wonderland

Poetry by Matthew Duggan ζ Art by Leigh Rooney

The Rocket Man Of Nordhausen

Star of David is burning

it’s points melted like peeling husks,

shield of six tips in lily white and ocean blue

now a coating in reddened dust.

Tight wire hung the curious mind

human cutlets fed the blooded hound

a man whose face you’d never see,

in the Nordhausen underground.

Crates of swinging silver discs

poured into the ponds of drowning flesh

in Dora – the skybound cylinders formed

through the laboured dermis of starving entrails,

Don’t slip on the human bark that spreads

like the soil from ash of charcoal bones,

You came in through these iron gates

and you’ll leave through the chimney.

His banality of evil could be easily misplaced

shedding his Vellum for another flag,

a figurehead for the upcoming space race.

Wonderland

In wonderland

scratch card and tenement block

deserted bunker

dirty needles

where headless statues

are painted

in rotten fish-heads and discarded butter.

Concrete square of boarded up

shop entrances

vomit smeared carpet of stone,

swaggering monkey men stroll the dankness

studded dogs on silver chains.

Bloodshed queue of kebab and taxi

where teeth decorate

yellow-lines,

spray tanned blondes

stumble bow-legged

singing songs into midnights neon moon.

The Imprisonment of Pan

Naked on the moor

skin sheared near to the bone

number jotted in thick blue ink

this wasteland is my abode.

Horns hacked from my skull

I watched the shell like shadow fall,

like a God’s fingertip scrawling the mountain

for the misplaced reaping of souls.

Rebooting my psyche

strands of dissent removed from memory

my hooves were relined for these paths

stripped of any thoughts towards enmity,

the stomach neatly stitched

my snout drips of phlegm and lithium,

I’m barcoded

microchipped

obeying the signs that have entrapped me,

No longer will I take the lead

I follow

when I’m told to follow!