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Christopher Hivner

The October Featured Poet is Christopher Hivner

Please feel free to email Christopher at: hailragnar@verison.net

christopher hivner

AUROMETALSAURUS

The ground shakes
when he walks,
the air sizzles
with arcs of energy,
the hero
of the Metal Wars,
Mastotron,
has returned home,
his thirty story tall body
a charred hulk,
the life in his digital eyes dimming.
But we don’t meet him
with cheers
nor riches.
Thank yous are said quietly
and then its back to daily life
while our mechanized warrior
is sent away
to be with his kind.
But he’s the only one left,
our only grace,
the one who sacrificed the most.
The light in his eyes
fades
as the darkness in our souls
grows.

SWEET DREAMS

Did you hear the noises?
They weren’t meant for you dear,
so go back to sleep.
“Lullaby,
and good night,
your time is coming.
Close your eyes,
I’ll get to you
when the others are all dead.”

A MOMENT IN THE SUN

They say the Sun is massive.
I’ve heard it is consuming
in its fire,
a belching beast of heat and power.
From the outpost,
it is unseen,
a possible dot of light
on taut fabric.

They say Mars
may have held life
in its rust-colored hands
millennia ago.
Here on my rock
comets pass like spitting snakes
and ancient dust
hides in the folds
of Einstein’s space-time,
but life will never form
in the cold virtue of distance.

I have absorbed
the loneliness of my home.
It flows through me
as nausea
until it settles like a stone
and I can’t move.
I shout to the heavens,
I plead with the pitted, sharp
surface of my world
but it is unrelenting
in its honesty,
unyielding in its bleakness.
I pound my fist
on its soul
and bleed
into the crevasses.

They gave it a name,
celebrating the existence,
they speculated
and dreamed,
romanticized and demeaned.
I sat on my outpost
and waited for the cameras
and self-important theorizers
for our moment
in the glare,
a spotlight for our made-up faces,
a moment in the sun.
But instead
they sent word
that we no longer mattered,
we weren’t part of your world,
a landscape too distant,
too small, too cold,
too little of everything
that mattered
to the new sheriffs in town.

They say the Sun
is a taskmaster,
keeping her children
on a tight leash,
ever circling in supplication
to her grandeur.
Out here,
in the hinterland of her world,
we have no mother.

Christopher Hivner writes from a small town in Pennsylvania surrounded by books and the echoes of music. He has recently been published in Inner Sins, Yellow Mama and Dark Moon Rising. A collection of short stories, The Spaces Between Your Screams was published by eTreasures Publishing.

You can find Christopher HERE