Seven Pits

A glimmer here, faint after-buzz of earthing
unmanageable voltage - so miswired
I twitch myself from sleep, uneasy breathing.

It’s cold and dark. I feel already frayed
at daybreak, have somehow to power through
these hours without completely getting fried.

Nothing much comes, not even in the shower. Blue,
bruised, is how I am. The water’s scathing,
near-scalding. There are hateful things to do.

Energeia, eternity’s delight
in time; even in deep space cryo-sleep
from which you wake much travelled though inert.

Say self-delight, as in the roadside cowslip
flowering in dense stands along the run
of harrowed earthworks, or the mission-creep

of bindweed raising trumpets to the sun;
say otherwise eternity’s blind-sight
into the moment, glimmering as one.

At last there is no resting place, no lasting
shelter from whipped-up crosswinds: to press on
is to be harried sideways. Try recasting

rough lateral displacement as a passion
for deviation, willed obliquity
just itching to break off from the procession:

I fidget so, which is not anomie
precisely but the usual way of wasting,
dispersing, unrequited energy.

Indisposed, that is, by innermost
disposition; or perhaps hormonal
balls-up wrongly diagnosed as lost-

Eden complex - sheen of kitchen-vinyl
drying in sunlight being the Eden I
cycle back to. Be it ingrown kernel

or stock implant, perennial sci-fi
premise, there is memory at last
to cling to or set down beside the way.

Trance may be overstating it - try dazed
auto-hypnosis, low-level mania
sparking within the cloud, transport confused

with tiredness; neural extemporanea
freaking the cortex, everything running down.
No need for draught of laudanum, or zanier

lysergic brain-melt bringing vision on
like migraine aura. I am indisposed
by dint of instress, nursing a damaged crown.

Drought being metaphor, scorched to the letter,
do well with similes; reduce to clear
in moments, like a microwave through butter.

Take visionary upsight as a near-
cousin of perception, perhaps ill-
bred: given to trances, to obscure

utterance, to scarcely convivial
fits and moods. Show antisocial splitter
hell-bent on self-enrichment, going fissile.

Severance packaged as opportunity
for self-improvement; for remediation,
transplanted thriving, fresh immunity.

I am again myself after a fashion:
aspie, neurotic, wilfully acute;
shrinking from rancour as from radiation

of that last meltdown. I had thought
aspie meant serpentine, or rather dry:
as shed snake-skin, as dying rasp of drought.

Beginning like ending an improper severance -
the cut thread frays, the dancing cable crackles
across the worktop. Onward under sufferance

towards no known end, pioneer of feckless
consecration, brusque kickstarting tyro,
spatter-gowned convener of debacles:

just see if you can swing this, until giro
cashed at least: make straight-backed riverdance
swish move to exit, grinning down El Toro.