Oracle’s End by J.P. Dancing Bear

Edvard Munch, At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo, 1892.

Oracle’s End

Truth, like love, has no winners.

This is why you never see
Casandra at the crap tables
calling out for snake eyes.
The old witches gathered around
the roulette table, their one eye,
bouncing and knocking into one slot
after another, as the wheel slows,
as fate is known.

No, Nostradamus did not catch a ship
to America, never opened a book shop
right off of Main Street. No kids
to legacy. No fortune in untold tales.

And even though there a jail cells,
there’s caldron with bones
that roil and roll from the trick of heroes,
even when the random bullet leaves its war
and finds a collateral skull,

truth, like love, has no losers.

J. P. Dancing Bear (Featured Poet, October, 2017) is co-editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared or will shortly in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, the DIAGRAM and elsewhere.