Tag Archives: The Suicide Fair

‘The Suicide Fair’ by Art Metzger

The wonderful weight of a rose, my boy,
on the back of a marble throne;
the sinister scratch of a thorn, my boy,
to open the red veins of home.

The red veins of home, they can lead you on
and on through gelatinous air.
The red veins of home, they can lead you down
to Hell, to the suicide fair.

The suicide fair, where a sputtering heart
taps its beat in a medicine chest,
where the steam trickles down tearing ribbons of flesh
from a visage where carnivores nest.

Your visage, your face, see it trickle away
in the glass where amphetimine tiers
hold razor blade toothpicks and capsules of dreams
and matches to trim ‘way your beard.

And hidden away, in a room with soft walls,
in the place where the needle tracks meet,
stretch crucifix highways of white powder fun
where small spoons stir a thorazine treat.

Round go the spoons, how they swirl you down
even deeper and faster than breath;
they swirl and spin till your mind’s left behind
in an eddy of lava-lamp death.

And then it all stops and you find yourself still
and alone on a quaint sylvan path
that leads to an oven where gas lies in wait
for your lungs to come breathe in their last.

The pale sylvan path, as it floats through the trees,
seeps with sadness in words that will rhyme
with powders and poisons and pills, my boy,
and a trigger that’s pulled just in time.

A trigger that’s weighted, a trigger that waits
at the end of a glistening gun
for the wonderful weight of a rose, my boy,
when the suicide fair has begun.

Copyright 2016 by Art Metzger. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.