Second Coming No. 150 — June 18, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Matthew Gilbert
Neon Ache
—for Max Barskih
Sing for the crackle of sails caught in shrapnel
snare-collapse of the living room screen—
precision-boom ballistics
fire-bloom—
television erased in drywall, debris,
and sequined-blood bulleted across the floor.
Hearts erupt in syncopation
when the air drone whistle drops the city frame.
Pink electric blurs into red streams
while all eyes record your frontline slay—
black leather shrouded in bruise.
You don olive-drab green, consecrating
your body in the name of your mother’s land.
You were not shaped to destroy, yet the gun will echo
long after the mic-drop silence of foreign boots
backstage.
Crowd-wave neutrality tusks the artist’s voice—
bandaged and sold on demand—
verse-fallen city still breathing.
Ocean’s away, my hands—
drained of inklings grown swollen—
blacken pages into tourniquet.
My country prays
in cobalt, liquid lithium,
and barters salvation for indium
while my taxes crown the wild boar.
But our ships have set sail.
I still my mind to the sunrise voice
cracking through tequila, velvet night—
all neon ache, all amethyst, sweat, and sky—
and how we pulsed,
not knowing how we trained for a different kind
of fight.
Before the battlefield,
starfall baritenor slipped the rivers I float,
where I learned what it means to glow.
You teased tectonic strobes
on platforms like underdressed water-silk,
bare-chested and on the bearing edge
of quenching the soul’s hunger.
Run riot and rattle,
swagger through the shockwave tides
until salt, spirit, and water
stick in the mud of home.
Let the rhythm unstrain us—
now standing on two different shores—
violence breaking the stage drums,
hands shaking, ribs rattling
in the thunder-thrum of this storm.
Matthew Gilbert‘s poems have appeared in Mockingbird, Delta Poetry Review, The Castle, Eunoia Review, Jimsonweed, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia (Texas Review Press, 2022) and I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2022). A co-founder and poetry editor of Black Moon Magazine, Gilbert holds an MA in English Literature from East Tennessee State University, and lives in Johnson City, TN.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.
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Nice poem. There is a Gerard Manley Hopkins type of feel to this poem, lots of rhythmic action in the lines, nice images, and also nice control. Very nice indeed. Walter