Mark Els Poetry
The Art of Words
LATEST
The Bored Housewife
OZYMANDEUS (2026)
You used to get so flustered when you opened the oven door,
its sticky eyelid sweetened with chicken stew,
made by mixing beef stock cubes and a small box of
Apricot Liqui-Fruit.
For your sake, I wished the microwave was radiation-free,
wished your germaphobic hands didn't turn hyaline
as they ran under a tenor-hot tap.
You discarded sullied dishrags wishing
they were doves, you hated housework and if only a pall of it
could iron itself over and over, automatically, as if by alien magic.
You had time to kill back then.
After a bottle of Autumn Harvest Crackling, your childhood
spooled out your eyes like an old movie. You told me
when you were little there was a road snaking the bus stop
from Sarnia and Elgin towards Petersons Place.
Your mom didn't pick you up and you had to walk.
Later you found her on the couch, drooped as an eyelid.
Sometimes you still see the empty glass body of her Smirnoff
laying next to the couch—its veined neck giggling
till it turns redder, until the nerves ease back down again.
You still feel alien, don't you? ... But a good alien.
An alien with radiation-free hands, an alien with
eyes wide as rainbows, your kitchen aglow,
holding up clothes pegs in a one-knuckle fist,
your unclean body like a beacon
waiting to go home.
Light Over Darkness
AVBOB
I can feel the dark lumps underneath her chin;
I often run my hand over them.
She gags and gestures to be let out,
she wants to vomit on the lawn – her body is rejecting a chicken neck bone.
She goes into the dark, away from the kitchen light,
the shadow of bats circling and cutting
into her swollen body on the lit grass.
She goes further into the dark of the garden, to the side,
as all dogs eventually do before they die;
they go out of sight, alone
so their smell does not attract unseen predators, which are
dangerous for the pack (our family).
All the while, white fireworks pop softly on November twelve;
Diwali lights roll across the night sky
and beneath the sky, sparklers
light the ground, silently.
Never Knowing
OZYMANDEUS (2026)
Before light even bedecks water, you will wriggle borne
thorny teeth, clash with siblings, and are expected
to be an apex. Never knowing you will regulate life on earth,
never knowing your ancestors are older than dinosaurs, even trees.
Held in a mix of saddle brown and misty rose
in a mermaid's purse, those jelly-filled pores on top of your head
will lend you a sixth sense for the turn in muscle tension,
the change in heartbeats.
You might be lucky and meet Port and Starboard, their collapsed dorsal
fins and iron smiles being the last thing you ever see. There are other hunters, but they are made of longer days,
their chum-stained palms deep red, their income dependent on the clout in "Walls of Death".
It's enough to drive you a little crazy ...
Never knowing humans will kill your kind 200,000 times a day,
and through mistaken identity, your kind may only kill ten of them annually, worldwide.
Never knowing how others perceive you, knowing only
that muted space between the nylon and the fray.