Hail Heaven by Willie Smith

Lightning rip; time hang;
air fuse; unwrapped thunder
crash. Hail rapture come.
Pellets plenty as ideas hop, parabola,
pop cocaine dandruff in the corpse hair.
Strip insight bare. Race out
back nude, cupping palms
to capture onslaught. Back
leans the eye. Bats lashes at
white stings above the green mane.
Maniacs better fed than this.
And not till hunger eats me up
do I fall to the make
in a rush of ice cracking stone.
God thought cold, think to clothe myself,
crunching shivers back inside a stuffy skull.

Willie Smith’s poems and stories have appeared in the toilet, the recycling, the gutter and in his worst nightmares. He is a retired office boy living off, in the form of a dubiously-deserved pension, the taxpayer.