Languish

Is this the sensible world
or just a sick joke my childhood upon me?
Derivative and febrile,
the water always ran too hot.
I singed my hair and taste buds looking for a freedom from a jail within a jail
within a jail within a jail within a jail.
And now you say I languish within myself.
And I may languish,
but I do so in a brilliant array of fragments of my fractured former self.
Reformed I may be staring at the mouth of the cut.
I may be begging for forgiveness from the trampling stampede.
Yet still they thrust, the naked horde, showering upon me an embarrassment of
riches of circuitous cliches.
I bathe in indignation cradling the bastard blade to my bad joker heart.
The body against the mind against the body.
I sunk the blade into my shadow, twisted then took off.
Feeling favored in the orchard of my discontents.
I hung around in waiting rooms, a rotting clementine.
Betrayal spat upon the soil and seeping to the roots.
I found a break in this recursion, swallowed then jumped in.
Sliding splinters into skin,
I tried to feel so alive that I couldn’t feel alive.
This bright heat, I’m rushing toward it. This cold hand, I’m rushing.
Now both memory and forgetting are against me,
and the anodyne of time is just the erosion of my brain.
Like a photograph exposed in reverse,
my neurons decouple in the dark.
Too little and too late, to free me of these thoughts,
of this unmeasured world.
The mind against the body against the mind.
A path toward beauty.
A path toward blindness.
I’m rushing toward it.