A January Summer In July
Night I am cold, though viscera burning,
I have pierced on a spit my torso turning.
Supposedly decomposing, et cetera;
words as per usual, concerning;
Do suggest a plethora, array, of conjured synonyms.
Inspire in me apathy, disinterest;
say, so that I can find Sleep. But once darkness fell,
I peeked under my pillow for it, and it was not there.
I even scrabbled around the flesh folds of dirtied blankets;
though I was compelled to make the gallant effort of
shifting the heft of my ungainly abdomen to one side;
My hand, adjoined in precarity, reached for my slowly pickling liver
in its jar on the shelf. Now you and I
acquainted in the present tense;
I extend my limbs, slender, so that you can't touch
the lazy pockets of fat inhabiting what I still seem to think is my Body,
stripping me of what could have been
a January summer in July;
Please help me fall asleep tonight in my own skin.
I clutch shards of ragged glass in my fists and take
a decadent sip from my bleeding palms;
these are metaphors flattened in tar and exhaustion,
and this is grief for images that will never be seen;
And my mind is stood hiding behind the curtain.
Drunkenly I tumble
into the arms of a Thesaurus with a mocking face,
and a man who loves for sport
26.01.2021, for Brian Strand's All Yours (Jan 26)
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