Listerine

Conventional mouth wash,
spearmint preference,
swishing it had never happened,
forgets that mourning breath.

Reaching where old brushes couldn't,
tidal waves of cleansing
gush over filled cavities,
a temporary fix of
freshening dignity.

Not returning to where one's been,
rather, masking what always is, though.

It's the food that leaves what rots your teeth,
and the brush that cleans it up.
It's the Listerine that fills what the brush missed,
but it's the water that never was
a culprit.

Of water,
erosion of your gnashing bones,
like a stream smoothing stone,
is the only plausible effect.

Rivers, a beautiful blemish anyway.

Cauldron

Leaves slowly caressing Northern winds,
flecked in the distance,
gently veiling a puppeteered cauldron
resting under a kind, Fall branch canopy.

Victim to a whisk of many disembodied, ethereal hands,
it sickly emits a verdant glow.

It's chill, but contents are hot;
a snowball filled with fire.

Beneath the soil it sits,
a network of retired roots,
Roman aqueducts,
wet only by the cauldron's sloshing, nauseous overspill,
shuddered out in spasm.

Drowning to the sound of a sitar,
heavy, smoke-suffocated agents are tossed in by those hands,
carelessly stewing despair.

Lofty branches have lost everything,
leaves all gone to the sugar-scented breeze
and the cauldron's no longer veiled,
not even gently.

Uncontainable boiling and fervent pressure are, over time, enough.
And as volcanoes erupt,
geysers outward the contents when they become too much.
And all the hands scatter,
except the tender palms propping it back up.