Black Holes To Walk Around

Poetry by Robert S. King

Black Holes To Walk Around

At the darkest hour
in the silent traffic of aching souls,
missing persons walk in circles
on one-way streets.

A window perhaps, a hole in the heart
shatters into echoes of the past.
A rusty hinge of regret shrieks,
bouncing back and forth
in the circling wind that blows back
flashes of stinging lives.

On any blind, empty street paved in black,
anyone might live as the invisible man,
but night feels what it hides, feels the breath
and gnaws of the hungry, the pinpricks
of stars slowly leaking the dawn
when dark memories retreat
from the spreading light, wait
in the cold cloak of their shadows.

Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA. He is a co-founder of FutureCycle Press. Since the 1970s his poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published nine poetry collections, most recently Developing a Photograph of God (2014), Messages from Multiverses (2020), and Selected Poems (2023). His personal website is www.robertsking.info.