THREE MOVEMENTS OF BLOOD
November 16, 2009
© Fred Dumpling. Redistribution is prohibited.
Rising
like a fever
in the bellows of your
pelvis, thorax, skull.
It's hot like a disease,
and it paints your eyelids a
merciless red
that you see when you sleep,
see when you wake.
You wish your pores were larger
so that they might expel more heat,
but they squeeze out your relief
one
drop
at
a
time.
Subsiding
back to your pumping heart.
The red leaves your eyes
and steals every other color with it.
You cannot see your legs or your hips,
nor can you feel them.
Above your waist, you feel
cold.
The clock on the wall mocks you with its
tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock,
but you cannot reach it
to throw it
smash it
break it, so you merely
let it
tick.
Sitting
in your bed,
your heavy head resting on
too-soft pillows
that cannot support its weight.
You wait
and wait
and wait
in sheets that stink of sweat and urine.
The magma still rakes your body
with its cobweb fingers.
The ice still rapes your body
with its mirthless tongue.
You are a corpse,
a doll, a burrow, and soon,
you shall be
less.
There the weary be at rest.
You mimic the syllables with
silent, cracking lips and
all the conviction of a death rattle.
You stopped measuring in units
long ago:
time, distance, life, purpose.
One big-small rhetorical question mark.
By the time the dry breath
has fled through the chapped window,
the house is vacant,
its host removed to who-knows-where
without taking
the
keys.