Very Bad Archive
Lava Heart
Sign Ifico
A playground on the street,
An empty playground in my heart.
A child slid down the slide,
My inner child waited on the slide of my heart.
A mother nursed her baby on a bench,
My heart suckled on maternal memories with Oedipal appetite.
A bum sat on a peanut butter cracker on the bench next to the nursing mother,
You squashed the peanut-butter-cracker-of-my-desires on the weathered bench of my heart.
A foaming-mouthed dog found the playground and attacked the children, dispensing rabies wildly and freely,
My father sank the rabid teeth of his psychotic envy into my tender heart and forced my heart to get 20 consecutive rabies shots in the stomach of my heart.
An earthquake with an epicenter 1.6 miles from the playground and 6.7 on the Richter scale generated a monstrous, gaping chasm that swallowed the playground, the slide, the children, the nursing mother, the bum with peanut butter on his britches, the rabid dog and all of the bright blue playground equipment,
The dark potential just below the surface of my heart exploded open in a faultline running down the relationship between you and me, shifting the earth of our love and engulfing our trust and friendship with the hot magma of guilt and suspicion.
My heart is a pointy lava rock that hurts your fingers when you touch it.
Sign Ifico has published another poem since joining on 30/11/99. Read more of Sign's terrible poetry at the anthology. Here are three of Sign's latest works: