Why Sometimes Do Images Begin to Tremble (after Chris Marker) by Edwin Rivera-Arias


 
 
In the city of broken televisions
electricity shivers down like snow.
Truth is put into escrow. Change
agents live off the skin in corpse
hotels. Wreckers convert monuments
to rubble. Powerless judges mumble
apocalypse in their robing rooms.
They know the rules: sow confusion
and reap disdain, open the box to
howling hate—this is the way to play
lord in the land of the unchained bible.
The Don Juan of automatons, like a sewer
king, rides an effluvial tide and a boil of
scorpion stings: wheeler-dealer, pusher
man, father of absurdity with rod in hand.
Watch as the last leaf falls like soft ash
blown from the gray arms of the cemetery
tree. The cold stars speak their necromancy.
Holy writ: the devil’s final babble,
sealed with neon spit.

 
 
 
Edwin Rivera-Arias’s last poem, “Amigos,” was published in Juked Magazine in April of 2017. He is a Writing Instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Previously, he worked as a laborer and a dockman for a chemical storage facility and oil pipeline company in New Jersey.