Brendon Booth-Jones

Ritual

Guitar strings held our innocence in motion,
a rum-hot, pine-scented campfire glow,
one strum at a time.

Until we smashed the guitar to bits,
which seemed like some sort of rite or MTV ritual.
But without the peroxided 90s angst
our self-destruction just felt pitiful.
It’s true: nobody likes you when you’re twenty three.
Not even you. And the splinters!
How they got into our fingers and eyes,
into our mouths and throats, into our speech,
and we worried ourselves sick with all the little teeth.

And meanwhile microplastics gathered in the lungs
of the ancient, graceful whale
as she navigated the lonesome Southern Ocean solo,
with her prehistoric cosmic radar,
her ancestors murmuring darkly
in her huge, grieving heart: my child my child. Beware.

We plunged
into the Levis Jeans Pool
next to the McDonald’s on Big Meat Street
to wash away
the shattered guitar’s needles and shards,
while spiders picked off crickets
in the yard, one fanged-strike at a time,
Nature rolling through her cycle in quiet ferocity.

But later that night, even three valiums deep,
the chlorine-blue chemical sleep
couldn’t keep our little cuts from weeping
red red red onto the sheets,
nor the big whale’s frightened wheezing
out of our dreams.

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Brendon Booth-Jones is the general editor of Writer’s Block Magazine in Amsterdam. Brendon’s photographs, poems and prose have appeared in the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018, Anti-Heroin Chic, Amaryllis, Botsotso, Neologism, Odd Magazine, Verdancies, Zigzag and elsewhere. Follow Brendon on Facebook @brendonboothjoneswriter.