Milk Thistle | Ray Osborn | The Hypocrite Reader


Ray Osborn

Milk Thistle


ISSUE 54 | DEGENERATES AND DECADENTS | JUL 2015

I can only think as far as I can imagine the horizon:
a sting I set on my own fettered tip of tuft and malaise
keeps me strung to the ground though strangely enough,
strung up with the hope that I myself and alone
might be myself, this the eternal ultimatum, unboiled lust
“I find myself finite. Am I really only one single flower?”

No, I am not this plausive poised on puckering petals;
they might be if unimagined but here screamingly,
cloistered in all the welled-up time of undoing
it took me to reach the present, cutting you, deluded,
and in your comeuppance you shake, full of holes, epee,
“Revenge is best served cold.” Imagine, Milk Thistle
wine.