The Plague And A Letter To It Poem by A.Z. McCoy

The plague reached shore long ago
Fed on air, fast food, and movies
And found legs in the dreary rock bottom
Musicians loved it, it made them feel notes
And strings with a pyrotechnic sensibility
The mainstream washed itself clean,
Then parachutes splashed into the mire
All consequences, poetic and dire, aside
It slept on the mind
And woke at odd hours with fury,
Desperate coughs, a quiver of spoken word
Lost in alley allure,
The kids left home to hear
The question was: where passed glory?
One in a billion stars let burning tears fall
Light years to a mortician's investigative knife
Glint and cold light, the casket spelled
Hollowed heartache to escape the cold
So the plague marched on and devoured all
Folded in on itself and crudely sculpting
With a promise of purity inside out
Crossed with capital-E Empty
Made journeys to government housing
And gated suburban geometries
Crossed the street with impunity
In the midst of dead-eyed, gridlocked traffic
Over rivers Lethe and Styx, the mist
Intoxicating when mixed with dawn's sunlight
And a lemon twist of gutter cocktail
Painted in Hollywood as the most beautiful blight
In the rose garden
You might see a friend or sister there,
Where death lingers in the industry's machine
It sprouts and grows, twisting up pillows
Invading some impressionable young kid's dream
All in the name of a lost spirit
Denied, its chill bores holes
To the mother in the graveyard
Flowers by the armful with her letters
'Dear Son, Not a day goes by
I wish you hadn't gone.'