​​

Librium

Poinsettias sprouted from self-inflicted stigmata, as I writhed beneath a sky spotted red with afterbirth.

I'd known pleasure, sure:

 

pleasure like a thousand tongues but, even in that, I'd found no resolution.

 

With planets and blood clots whirling around me, I'd inevitably began to burn as I hurtled towards humanity.

 

What was god, but a cruel parent, answering only First World Prayers?

 

During the descent, I seemed to know the truth.

 

This spaceman, this psychonaut:

 

     a dendrite, a synaptic gap,

     mangled -

     the texture of meat being chewed.

​

For years, I needed no justification beyond my assertion that:

 

     "I feel so much, that sometimes, it feels like too much."

 

And so, I dangled like cigarette ash, living as if my Future-Self would be someone else entirely:

 

     My life, my broken ribs,

     just another lurid illustration of the ways in which

     humanity's evolutionary adaptations

 

     are at odds with

     the excesses of modernity.

 

In the hospital, I learned how

 radio denies sight,

 

antiseptic and deprived:

 

I'd become a declawed cat,

 

A man castrated,

all but phantom pain, now.

 

“How will I interface with this world?” I wondered,

As I rode, strapped down

​

     suffering

     strange visions:

​

Turtles were submerged in buckets of vodka,

such they would drown unless

they'd drink the liquor -

to lower thes level of the booze

so they were able to surface, to breathe again.

​

At one point, I considered historical accounts of the guillotine during the French Revolution, that described, how after a beheading, the decapitated head would blink and look around,

 

for a moment, still awake

​

before being kicked aside.

 

I had a body, yes -

and someday, I hoped to donate

it to science.

 

But, there, standing in a hospital gown and no-slip socks, I could only hope for sleep, or something like it

 

because, after all,

​

there was only so much Librium

in the world.