Joshua Jennings

The Wolves


It's a ghastly time
to be naked:
waking up
in a hotel room closet
as last night's bile
fries on the cobble stones
20 floors down.

How did
the underpants
wind up there?
Neither the rats,
the pigeons or the buskers
could care less.

"I don't think an ambulance
will help," somebody says eventually.

A black sun
dawns
in the heart
as it pumps
out a wooden
and wonky
beat.

And that bar,
the one-time church,
is now a dead-end:
It's where the neon-coloured woman
with silicone breasts
is motorboating
an old man
with cobwebs in his ears
- in the darkest corner
of the room.

The street
is no kinder.
Its benches feel like cactuses
and its signs are crooked.
It ages
with tuberculosis
while cars with spooky headlights
hiss past
and spread Cold War-gloom
through their horns.

The wolves
are roaming
the mind's corridors
tonight,
smacking their lips
and nudging the doors
with their noses;
the bomb finally detonates
in the mind
and the eyes
fill
with the flames
of an apocalypse.


Somebody unbuttons his shirt
and pours water on him,
and he huddles tight
as his breathing shallows,
his fever soars,
his pulse turns hell-wards
and the tremors
barrel through
his yellowing limbs.

"The ambulance
won't make it tonight,"
somebody whispers eventually
from a long way away.

But the wolves
are already here,
again.

Joshua Jennings is a Melbourne journalist.  His poems and fiction have appeared in various publications
including Word Riot, Dogmatika, Neon, Sex and Guts Magazine, The New England Review, Idiom 23 and Beyond
the Rainbow.