Archive
07/12/10 - (2)
My Torment
For so many more years than I'd recorded In emotion's disappearing ink, Torment had been my only source of relief from reality,
The one savior capable of disengaging me from destiny, Alleviating my tribulations, Stabilizing me in a holding pattern, in my psyche's stormy sky.
To say that I was never appreciative of such paradoxical subtleties, The ironic nuances of antinomies, disparate anomalies, The perverse symmetry of ambivalences and ambiguities,
Would have been to deny my poetic intellect and intuition their freedom, Tell them to pack up their grub- and tenterhook stakes, Take a long Chaplinesque cakewalk/Bridge of Sighs hike
Down a surreal, metaphysical, narrower-than-straighter path, On a Grand Canyon burro, Suggest that I've not been grateful for saving-grace party favors,
Occasional blue-sky openings in the pervasive gray cloud cover Providing my gloom a place for my pain to hide, A natural location for my soul to set up house.
But when torment decided that it had outlived its relevance, Sensed that it and I meant nothing to each other, Except, maybe, perhaps, forty years of endurance, perseverance,
Waiting out the inevitable quietus that precedes resurrection, All I could assume, from the dust of the sadness and gloom, Was that life had reached its apogee, Achieved its obsolescence, its malaise's indifference, The rest of its destiny's coin-of-the-realm essence, Had retracted each of its hedged bets against death.
Then it was that everything I'd ever believed came a cropper, Like Colonel Sutpen before Wash Jones's scythe, Came atumble, in my grand design's exploding soap bubble,
Came undone, in the blink of Sammy Davis's one good eye, Moshe Dayan's sole functioning pupil, And in that visionary glint, life died, purblind, of natural causes,
Even as I decided to give up the ghost of my ghost, Say yes, say no, simultaneously, before lying down, dying, Fully clothed, in nakedness, in a closed open casket,
Inviting all my mourners to finger the fabric of my embalmed flesh, Pay their last respects to my fermenting torment, The festering legacy of perpetual regret divorce left in my ashes.
07/12/10 - (2)
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