MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION

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In these final days the minutes drop

like tears dripping off the face of the countdown clock,

echoing, maddening, leaky faucet of time, idiot circling hands

pointing nowhere, the simile of my hours turning around the axis of oblivion;

days falling away like the hairs from my scalp like the teeth from my mouth,

leaving vacancies; too many hollow spaces for the small room where I sit

drinking tea and counting pennies: crushing weight of cliche emptiness

bowing shoulders, twisting spine deadening nerves, blearing eyes;

waiting, waiting, examining the entrails of each moment for meaning.

Sleep escapes me, tiny refuge where arms encircle me, smiles

greet my appearance, pleasure and hope and significance dance

a tango sensual and seductive, trio of sirens greedy for this body, this soul;

now a living thing, a beast cunning, elusive and dangerous and I

an incompetent hunter stumbling noisily through dense and trackless wilds:

but just the days, just the ordinary hours unenhanced by metaphor

or romantically embellished imaginings, stretched by what impends,

flattened by what is into some representation of life abstracted to a single edge,

without color or topography or source of light.

Vanishing now the friends and lovers, the dreams of achievement,

the paths of glory and byways of sensation; stripped away

in a single cataclysm of a too much burdened heart;

the ragged beggar on the corner blackened with life and grimed

with the pollutions of love's decay, now inhabits this wasting flesh,

peers out from these burning eyes reaches with these trembling hands

for any scrap of nourishment, any coin of compassion, shameless,

saintlike in patience and acceptance, mumbling nonsense to ghosts

as you pass him by with eyes averted, shuddering and briefly wondering why?

Karma, the would-be sages whisper; Chaos say the self-righteous materialists;

the will of God proclaim the religious; he brought it on himself the universal

thought behind the mask of concern and they are all right

and they are all wrong; and they gape at images of dead princesses

and the funerals of saints and the endless wars of good and evil

and greed and patriotic ferver real or crafted for art or commerce

and see only themselves, comprehending nothing; and I sit

and count my pennies, drinking tea and waiting

as the sun spirals in

toward the

final

darkness.

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