For the Inspirations poetry contest, Jan-Feb round. |
*Winner of the Jan-Feb 2011 Round of the now defunct Inspirations poetry contest.* I feel a sadistic, snarling tharrump against the cavernous, empty spaces of my rib-caged prison. And I contemplate memories that do me no good. Dangerous meditation on the time I swapped hearts with a heartless man. An Arthur Miller salesman, dead or dying, a two-bit con, he was a dead-souled Adonis. A silken-voiced weaver of love and lust; sweet subterfuge of the soul. The delicious sin, the tantalizing rapture of delight ran through me. Addicting, enslaving, I sank into molasses-thick communion with my own abasement. I delighted in our empty-branched love, and inconsequential lust. And in the midst of wicked delight, I felt suddenly a cavernous emptiness, a maelstrom of arctic nothing. Where once my beating soul had spelled out my hopes and dreams, there was a diseased mass of atrium and ventricle, accomplishing naught but blood flow and scant survival. I searched for that thief of me, but he was gone, oozing into the cracks of detrimental memory. And so I remain here, stuck in this pitiless limbo; waiting, hoping, praying on my imperfect sinner’s knees that I might someday find a man who’s souled enough for me. |