Flayed

That's me on the table pinioned
by angst, my tendons ripped and tied.
I’m sipping ether narcotized
and looking at an Xray of my evisceration.

I see I think a reflection in the surgery room’s
halogen lamp, hot as the eighth circle of hell,
my lies of self, and specters come and go,
clothed in bones.

I know I'm somewhere in the blackness of the room,
my teeth gnashing like a metronome,
my tongue swollen in rant and looking at life
through trifocals smudged in delusion.

I’m dressed in old stanzas from another person’s poem,
ill fitting. A Rimbaud tie, the waistcoat Apollinaire,
one sleeve Poe, the other Cocteau. And Duchamp shoes worn
on my hands to warm my soullessness.

I look down upon my flayed self to see my heart
tapping like a hammer flailing at nail heads
tap/tap/tap/tap
driven into pine planks.

I bolt upright from the gurney’s straps
and roll my sleeves up, my arms tattooed
with liver spots, scrivener’s glyphs
demarking my experience without innocence.

And now the end, Byzantium, my hair thin,
my eyes glazed, words on a page through
my fractal trifocals as hazed as worms,
slithering maggots, I’m wriggling on a pin.

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He's proud to have published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, the Decadent Review, Underwood Press, Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, Vermilion, and more, plus his chapbooks Once Planed Straight: Poetry of the Prairies and Viral: Love and Losses in the Time of Insanity from Spartan Press.