Leon Lowder
It is never the right time.
It is never the right place.
It is the lost time.
It is the forgotten place.
It is the time of tiny Lucifers
Dancing to commercial jingles
With sulfur in their lungs,
Mud caked on hooved feet.
It is the time of obese devils
Swaggering back and forth
In well-cut suits with ties fit for hanging.
Never used properly.
We make no grand satanic bargains,
We love our own cruelness,
Baphomet is already inside us, beside us,
As we mutter endless prayers in tinfoil churches.
Murmuring malevolence fills us up slowly.
Like car exhaust in a closed garage,
We breathe it in and no longer notice
Cankers on lips, blisters on tongues.
Now is the time to scamper to much darker dales
on rutted, slippery paths,
to panic and flutter in fetid fear
at midday in murky waters.
***
Leon Lowder is a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State. His work has been published in Red River Review, Passager, Exposition Review and Typishly.