Marc Darnell is an online tutor and lead custodian in Omaha NE.   He received his MFA from the University of Iowa, and has published poems in The Lyric, Rue Scribe, Verse, Skidrow Penthouse, Shot Glass Journal, The HyperTexts, Candelabrum, The Road Not Taken, Aries, Ship of Fools, Open Minds Quarterly, The Fib Review, Verse-Virtual, Blue Unicorn, Ragazine, The Literary Nest, The Pangolin Review, and elsewhere.

Pink Baby On Yellow Bed Sheets

And the world outside screams and swirls,
but the room celebrates its own cubism,
drapes angular, aquamarine,
protective of the Jesus girl,
clementines in a chain
off the corner of the dresser.

Light rolls in a seagull fog
upon the sleeping
bulb of rosiness.

O nesting blank, amoebic,
you are all globular and dream
with eddying thoughts of 
your mother's waning spring.

But beyond this Cezannian roof
of sweat and crooked straw,
the crowds cut each other endlessly,
revising their laws
and dying dumber than they were born.

The Domination Of White

She lay in O'Keeffe petals, white,
and octopus cords land-sick
in this moth butter of a room,
while the phantom scrubs outside
drained the living out of the dying
and sipped saccharine sewage.

The outer grounds were a spiral,
a beating bloody onion
of new black and red Toyotas
that escaped her mind
as all other inventions,
including spoons and artificial roses.

One cell had snowballed,
divided into blizzards within,
gusts of prickly, morphing cauliflower
that loved the love out of her organs,
as her skull became more skull
and heaven's windows went dull.

A Recitation Of Tint

There are people sporting off-white faces
who look horizontally
at burning houses
with glass replacement eyes.

And green and blue-striped faces
glued to the grape sky
and it's boneless blackbirds
falling like ink drops.

The off-white faces lie in the sun
to darken their pride,
but their pride is at its peak,
so they stand in their beige bathrooms
translucent in their mirrors.

The striped ones dance
on the O of HOPE
as if tribal with the dragonflies,
and when they look in the lake
reflection is just
that king of loving sea monsters.

Color is heart-deep,
animal-deep.
May we return to all fours,
smell, howl, sleep roofless,
abandon star-worship.