Poem, or My Certainty that Death is a Swede
These whip wounds ooze proud, self-inflicted.
Look, I’ve unplugged the drain.
I beg the scalding pity of any deity that cares to listen
No banquets or bouquets until I’m bled...
Up, up lo’ the pedestal sits the ghost of inclusion! Of
Acceptance! Of Russia’s single year of true communism.
It hasn’t begun, yet it is already over.
We sit in that room and laugh and laugh
And laugh and laugh and laugh
And spin echoes into phrases into
Incantations to coax some spirit in limbo - some meaning
In flesh to this mad mad modern age.
Laughter so desperate we’re wet
at the creases in our eyes.
Crying, “Take me!” Take me flesh or take me death.
Either will do but both is better.
Looking through,
Eyes wide, glazed, the insistence
that our confessionals are oceans, not fields fallow.
How many time will we lay naked our perversions,
unmoor our secret shames,
Let leak all the pus and filth and bad blood.
When will we be empty?
The empty that asks, “Fill me up?”
Not this empty, this miserable feedback loop.
This oroborus, this masochism.
We feast on pulpy maggots,
Pastries and soups of mold and mush.
And glance away shy and wet and flushed,
And we turn our heads and are struck
By the Shadow in the corner of the room.
Or worse, the lack of,
That lack vows a round glass emptiness,
Taunts,
That there is an emptier yet.
A basin, a gouge, an endless deluge,
That washed naked the proclamations we’d made
On the dining room chairs, wood rotting from the pretenses.
The “woe is me, I’m a criminal, I’m a harlot,
I’m a bastard child, I’m a blot of inadequacies.
I’m beyond salvation but I’m winning over the jury.”
I’m a sinner! I’m a sinner! You cannot look away.
We’ll revel in the reeds, we’ll turn Dionysis dark,
We’ll swallow zoloft and shit wine and whatever is said
To raise the tides for the shipyard of anchors that
tether our restless minds.
Shower me in roses, I’m broken! I’m in love!
I fear I’ll lose one if
I give myself over to the other.
Broken? Broken! I refuse to be fixed!
Let me up on the chair!
Scatter me, I’m in pieces, I am a many, I am disunity and discord
I am the deluge, the reckoning. I am cresting the foamy head of each
Angry, miserable wave.
I am in love, I am fucking ceaseless, I am fucking ceaselessly.
I am full of feeling when this damp speaks His name.
God: you son of a bitch,
Why have you given me want and chained it to guilt?
Why have you given me love and chained it to mistrust?
I want, I want, I want, I will never cease.