Larry D. Thacker
Neon Lover
There’s something about neon that seduces me.
A sign or two I can handle, thank goodness, but
a street in Korea or Japan vertically striped
like sliced night sun, the buzzy tentacles lifting
the spirit of my electromagnetic being off the sidewalk
and down an alley into the true pulse of the city. This,
I found, I could never resist. I was its constant mindful
color lusting whore, swearing to be true inside its
morphed electric gut of another planet, squirming
in my mutual birth and sex act, a scream away
from deliverance and arrival, eyes thieved away
by a burned scene on the back of my brain, unblinking,
feral in the night wind tasting of metal and liquor.
Larry D. Thacker is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia (Overmountain Press, 2007) and the poetry chapbooks Voice Hunting (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and Memory Train (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in The Still Journal, Unbroken Journal, Mojave River Review, and other journals, as well as in Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee (Texas Review Press, 2013). A student services higher education professional for fifteen years, he is now completing an MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
This poem is not previously published.