MK KUOL

a poet’s death doesn’t come calling

god dug his fluid teeth into the pith of another inchoate night.
an angry angel unfurled a blank scroll. a sable sun wilted into a stale star.
there’s no way a sky isn’t a sonnet, a dark-hued demon declared.
god nodded as he watched all reverting to roots. as he watched a doomed
world wrung into those winged words he exhaled at the fluky birth
of all bedlam. paradise is this world scrubbed of stains religions
have blemished it with, a sophist exclaimed. this was the ninth night we saw
churchill & hitler hanging out in tartarus. in a haiku where hiroshima was
alliterated with horror, a poet―who believes a poet’s death doesn’t come calling:
that he dies the day his quill only siphons from the shallow bowl of mediocrity―
wrote, to merely condemn evil is to debark a tree you wish to rid: it doesn’t
extirpate it. another angry angel unfurled a scroll, scribbled in a strange tongue.
we scampered into it, looking for the traces of our evanescent existence on its margins. the moon
unhinged, fell into the foam of our lost voices. once he feels lost,
a wise son seeks himself in the shadow of his father, exclaimed another sophist.
the trumpet blew. again, we scampered into the womb of languages none a tongue
lured to life for refuge. the dark-hued demon pleaded in a paean: discard the
depictions dear friends. the fiend is he who will, to the lake of fire, cast you? a poet, with a sterile song,
tortured his tongue to wring wisdom out of the demon’s contention. a steaming angel threatened to
blow out his flame of life. the dark-hued demon scoffed. to the shivering poet, said: why fear when
poets are the eternal
custodians of god’s words? you’ll only pass away when they pass away…

MK Kuol is an award-winning, severally anthologised poet with three chapbooks to his name. His chapbook, twice the size of sun, was the runner up of the annual Pengician Poetry Chapbook Prize. MK Kuol loves dark rooms, coffee and conspiracies.