Wanderlust of the Comatose - Margaret Stawowy
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cryptic as the phantom fish they expect you to catch.
What trail of synapse are you warping, each day as long as two years?
If you want to go home, try counting backwards from 100 by 3’s—
just follow the lizards crawling across the ceiling—
when you reach negative 1, look down.
See the women on the shore? That’s your name they’re calling.
Your dog is in the driveway waiting,
while the lotus eaters prepare your homecoming banquet:
goat and hot links on the grill.
Great deejay, but it’s still a boring party with too many good old boys
pissing in the bushes.
What they don’t get is that you live in two places now, disconnected
as your broken ribs served up on a platter.
Your eyelids suspend over bruised sunsets, hot as infection.
Just one twitch and subterranean seas will rise again.
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Margaret writes concerning this poem's connection to addiction/compulsion: 2007 was the year when I became one of the women on the shore, calling names of friends in hospital beds. Watching them slide in and out of consciousness/lucidity, listening to their startling pronouncements, they seemed in the thrall of some sort of interior odyssey, charting odd roads of brain geography. Heady stuff, yes, but at what price?
1 comment:
That was absolutely haunting. The disconnect between two conscious levels, and the despair of ever seeing them merge...the sense of the narrator as the bridge between, seeing both sides and one with neither...
I love that this is a North Carolina site, as well. I live in Hertford, NC - there is not a huge literary community here, but there is silence - and a swamp - both conducive to creativity.
DNW
Macabre Ink
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