Tom Daley
The Culpables
In the horror of their toys,
they have thinned their chances.
Each cloud now a spigot
bereft of cold.
Sunspot surgery
the latest diversion.
Eyes knitted thin
as poison ivy.
The smell of everything
caked into haloes.
Every hill turned to dune
that melts in the sixty-year storm.
Nobody wants to lose
their candy wrappers,
their polished apples,
their rights to a shiny siesta.
Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Hacks: Ten Years on Grub Street (Random House, 2007); Poets for Haiti (Yileen Press, 2010); The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013); and Luminous Echoes (Into the Void, 2017). He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.
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