“Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.” FREUD
There was a moment during the night when I groped
For the plastic light, between a dream and a nightmare.
True blue from the DVD device.
Slick, oil-spill darkness in between.
There, on the nightstand--
Leprous with the suction-cup scars of Octopi
(Only mausoleums to my barren
Interviews with sweating mugs)
--I had faith that I could reach through the steam of
Nightsweats, recover its gouged-eyeball chain, and
--Give birth--
To a luminance hammered in the furnaces of Mind,
Like a wounded Prometheus, pleading only to once more
Usher a manufactured dawn into our blacker dreams,
The ones we see in the pupils of others and in mirrors.
Prevented by a scarlet arabesque, however:
The diabolical 343 that knew me and the cause of my birth,
I shriveled into a coccon of fetal expiration.
:: :: :: ::
And through those sable sheets,
Past butterflies' long-dead wings,
I stepped into a winter palace,
Where the twilit January, like lamps burning underwater,
Fell blue and electric through crystal windows
That stretched erect to the ungraspable ceiling.
With each footless step, I realized the check-board marble,
Until there, at a deathly piano,
Gleaming black like polished sin,
My ham and beans torso pickled with "KNOW" while the
Headless man pronounced each key, and verified its soul.
I knew that slim white stags contorted in the drifts outside,
Though they were caught behind the icy gates of birches.
And when the phantom huntsman stood from his solitary guige,
His empty shoulders gazed at me, and I felt the Truth of
His ineffable form before his grip had even
Seduced me to dissolution on the
Frost-darkened marble floor.
:: :: :: ::
And when I sprung into the fear-dampened flesh that
Now revived in the starless gloom of a wallpapered cave,
The sulfurous 355 still knew the cause of my birth and the
Dissolving illusions of my suffocating Mind
In its crystalline wonderland.
