A Heavy Gold Mask Will Be To No Avail

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem 

He’s like a mummy speaking to the gods

Through gauze wrapped round his eyes and mouth and face.

The gooeyness has dried, but still he prods

The fabric with his tongue.  He tries to trace

Some meaning to the inner surface yet

It keeps his mumbling trapped inside the cloth

And chemicals.  They fight his body’s blet

But he is like a harsh-pinned, dried up moth

A desert net once captured.  Rigid, he

Finds depths cannot speak out in hieroglyphs

Or ancient Greek.  No sentences are free

In him.  They’ve fallen off all lovers’ cliffs.

  Rosetta Stones will not transmute his heart.

    There’s nothing that his dry lips can impart.

   ChatGPT image prompted by the poet

~ Phillip Whidden