PART I

Last year,
the emaciated month
of January
began to make
its grotesque transition
from carrion to spent carcass,
the thirty one bones picked apart,
the meat
whether good, whether bad,
nonetheless eaten,
the lung emptied
of its deadened bleat
to become
the first of twelve lambs to succumb
to the predatory jaws of sacrifice,
the inevitable circumstance
of fate bearing down,
consumed by that curious,
invisible weight,
dragged by that anchor
to the blind wonder
of being gone,
the body of days left to lie
forever drowned in the infinite
depths of oblivion’s pond.

Time, which needs not permission,
thus thrust itself into
the newness of the new year,
whose threshold bore
no semblance of barrier,
was penetrated easily
in manner deemed so
obviously seemly,
a ceremony observed
since the days of old,
the rite to rip the seam of hymen
however crudely, however uncleanly,
to enter further on, to cast aside the used,
to move measuredly on,
man largely and utterly unpuzzled,
proceeds to tear the virginal page
to favor, for a spell, the twenty eight dates
of February.
Somewhere, in the muddled middle
of that frozen month,

I made my pilgrimaging frigid plunge
into madness,
subsumed by that sordid state,
having subsisted on the doctor’s
prescription speed and the black market
sedative,
from which I
borrowed life and death
alternately,
swallowed heaven’s
paranoid high,
flew like a strange
little bird
flapping up
outside of myself,
ascending toward
transcendence,
bolting for the buzzing
incandescent bulb
hanged overhead that
seduced me,
suffused me,
confused me with its dazzle.
I was careless as Icarus
with my invented wings,
craving the alms
of the artificial sun,
nihilistic,
masochistic,
I lusted after that white heat

wanted to feel
the searing wax
begin to drip away,
to tear
each feather
from each fin,
to fall unfluttering,
to make my
dumbstruck descent
into hell, listening, listening
to the sweet pharmaceutical
blue lullaby
that staggered me to bed
in a stupor.
I wore that numbness
like a second, insentient,
insistent skin,
became an unblinking doll,
a hollow, bloodless mannequin
staring, penniless, at myself
through the store window.
The display model,
so utterly nude,
too lewd to be sold,
soon relegated
to the unnamed, untagged
inventory populating
the stockroom,
those undesirable goods
soldered to sleep,
beneath the shut out moon.

02/02/2014

Posted on 02/02/2014
Copyright © 2024 Dane Campbell