Tuesday, April 7, 2009

After (work in progress)

For those who read this, I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Here is a new addition to my thesis. When it is finished, it will be the longest poem I've ever written.
Thanks for reading.
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After

I.
The bed, your eyes almost
wandered, nerve tissue and cells under flesh
decomposed, the fleshy matter terminated
uncontrolled. Festering belly. A wave
of your hand because you could not
speak, whispered raspy, I love yous.

Experts on death suggest the body
attaches to pain.

A grey lightness to things
which are changed;

The sheets covered
like limpid paper, a body lingers
hollowed in bed.

Dad, there was nothing else,
what else was there
to say. We were exhausted.


II.
If we measured in hours,
the hours became capsular cavities,
hollowed by capsular minutes and so on
down to stillness itself, until barely
anything. Division slowed the brain.
I thought,

I am the gridded picture window
outlining the portrait of the front yard.
I am this couch I sit on.

But I am the smallest unit,
hollow atom creating something larger.
Inconstant quantums making empty electrons.
We were barely anything at all.

III.
Your smell was something rotting.
Your room, sterile chemicals from a bottle
from a box.
We were the disgust we were ashamed of.
Your body an alien, belly protruding and painful,
impossible to hold.


IV.
The mind, it thinks nothing.

Vital organ functions taking place
in the nervous system, in the spine;
poorly the stomach acid circling.
The solid stomach no longer finite.
We are no longer eating.

Daily activities assigned to more primitive
parts of the brain; the body walks itself.
The impression of floating.

Even feelings are soma.
Passive branches the brain in waves.
A largeness.

We wonder what it is like
not to feel this, the body growing
another layer, tree-like spiral.
We are covered in loss.

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