I was
        on the edge

sprouting tubes, IVs
bloated and heavy with fluid,
monitors tracing
the scampering of my heart,
my wheezy breath.

They wanted to strap the torso
of a corpse to my back,
the mouth hung open,
slack-jawed. I was
so terrified, wild,

and afterwards sat
on the patchy front lawn,
watching onion skins
shrivel and crisp.

The scallops squat
in their queer little cesspool,
small moon-white
skulls, vulnerable
like bare flesh
and hissing and spitting
in their juices,
gelling on the edges
like late November lake ice.
Dumpy little membranes,
they're applauding! -
percolating and foaming
at the mouth, and quickly,
now roaring - ecstatic
in a watery grave
that looks and feels like home.

Unspool your foggy self-
importances and seize the sheer, visceral present,
or simply ladle and spoon
the strait and narrow. Truth skims
the surface of the mind's eye -
immediacy and brutality (always your specialties)
are to be expected, even pursued,
the loosening of mind and its swindling of body
sifted under opportunistic eyes.

(I imagine tragedies rolling like marbles in your ivoried hands).

It’s fairly comfortable from here.

There’s a place to lay my head 

And rest my feet, leaden purple

And always tingling with cold.

Now I nurture it,

Like a mother toward a child –
Cloying and petulant,

It wheedles and moans,

Incorrigible. Blindly,

And against better judgement,

I sweep what little

Flaky resolve remains,
Littered 
on the cool linoleum.

And even as I gag
On the thick,

Metallic bit of

Danger (muscles atrophy, 

The flesh strung against bone)

Honesty is something I can

No longer afford.