hell(d) fire

I’ve been coiled in barbed wire for two days

surgically implanted by callous hands and to

seek an explanation for this dangerous condition

one need only open the book of the past, a book

that always unlocks when bound by metal, always

drags together its pieces when detonated with a

timer, always knocks on the door dripping wet with

salt water when shredded to incoherent phrases

placed in a glass bottle corked and hurled with

teary-hearted might into the Atlantic maw of treasure

and trash, it returns and demands satisfaction and

attention and takes such in blood and mental anguish

and sourest of stomachs. I’m coiled in barbed wire,

and it’s hungry.  It finds the images and engorges

sometimes chewing with sadistic glee gnashing and

often swallowing whole leaving the image intact but

alone in the end in damp, acrid nebula, a beastly chorus

of disapproval, a litany of laughing faces (the normal

stuff, really, the normal stuff) and there’s her face

(we have talked about her, the girl from college who

went to Italy for a year and swam in my head in erotic

undulations for the same length of time) and she

is laughing so hard her lips are spinning whirling

whizzzzziinngggg like a bedroom fan for those

deplorable August overnights when the cat is

sleeping in front of the room’s AC vent, and she

is wearing a white t-shirt splattered with purple

letters jaggedly spelling OPPORTUNITY MOCKS

and yes I hear the music of Prince and can’t move

my face to the appropriate recognition of irony,

as she screams a mountain lion walks into my view

and placidly acknowledges me but I am pained my

left side heaves and this wild cat has given me

appendicitis then my body seizes then separates

violently several directions simultaneously, a

drawn-and-quartered outlaw whose demise is

salivated upon by a queen with a crooked and

tarnished crown. the crown is golden chocolate,

and I have melted, and she never will.