Limes with Orange

Of the five poems that I decided to choose from for the open mike night, some of them are already posted on this blog: "Echoes" (in Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition), "Ground War" (in I'm baaack) and now "When your body betrays you" (in Open Mike Night). So here's a fourth that I'm considering.

This one was written during my first year of university when I had run out of money and was rationing my food beyond rational levels, trying to make it stretch until my grant came in. Then a friend offered to take me out for a movie and dessert. Instead of asking for real food (which I desperately needed), I gave into temptation and ordered a decadent chocolate cake and an espresso. I ended up with a sugar/caffeine high that was more intense than any drug I've ever taken (wow, that makes me sound like some kind of druggie... I swear, I'm not). When I got home, I had to lie down on my bed because the room was spinning and this poem was basically swirling about on the ceiling for me to write down. (I was also reading a book of mathematical science fiction stories at the time, which I think had some influence.)

Hunger

I close my eyes
I see only darkness.

But there is one light
circling,
flashing,
spinning about my head.
The darkness becomes a topological landscape —
shapes ballooning,
shrinking,
rotating
faster and faster.
It is the pain in my stomach,
the hunger that won't disappear.
I stand;
I fall back into my spinning world of weakness:
the flesh,
the spirit.
There is so much I must do
but I can only spin,
only think of
the hunger.

It is a drug that deadens the senses,
confuses the mind.

There is whiteness,
blackness,
of space,
of asylum.
I am lost
in the dimensionless void.

Concentration
Direction
Decision
Completion

Hurl away into the vast darkness;
Whirl away into oblivion.

Someone must throw a rope to this dying soldier in flatland
before I lose my perception of
up and down
(dup and owen);
before I lose my grasp of
mind and matter
matter and mind
(what really matters and why do I mind?).
My fragile reality is slipping
or am I throwing it away
to watch it break,
shatter,
into a million distorted realities.

Darkness
Brightness
Emptiness
Pain

Hunger

*

Eat

I must eat to think,
I must think to act,
I must act to live,
I must live to...
die.

Disperse the clouds of fog from my reason!
I must think to survive!
The frustration of my hunger,
of my weakness
saps me of my strength —
a vicious circle
vicious spiral
down (owen)
down (owen)
into the nothingness
I have tried to avoid.

I close my eyes
I see only darkness.

cm
october 16, 1988

Labels: poetry