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Chronicle of Fools
___The Horror, 2020

I look down from the window.
Legs amble past this cuckoo’s nest,
jeans and shorts stroll by
as preamble to a game of chance –
absolute risk the ultimate gamble
in this unpeopled silence.

The jester king regnant in cap and bells
tricks the crowd with sticks and stones,
unburied bones shifting in the twilight,
drift, fall away.
Trust is now an enormous no
in the unpent new age,
rage flows like water.

Faces uncovered,
village idiots reveal deathly smiles
hoping for miracles,
for the past to return
predictable familiarities gone-by.

Taunting a hungry hunter,
they fall,
wait for the fever, the cough,
the breathless wonder of death
in the slow turn to dust
bringing the final goodnight.

In her eighth decade, award-winning poet and mixed-media artist Ryn Holmes originated from the bottom and top of California before finding her way to the Florida Gulf Coast. A partner in K & K Writing Services and co-editor of Panoply zine, her written work and visual art have appeared in galleries as well as print and online journals.