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| "Der Krieg" - Otto Dix, 1924 |
It is relentless,
this pain of being,
defying the palliative caress
of habit and blanketings
of unmindfulness and forgetting.
The insistent presence of it,
a keening wire
of noise in the brain,
heated through with currents
of ever increasing potency.
These thoughts,
like barbarians
at the gate of my soul,
I entertain with mindless banter
and frantic antic dance,
parodies of welcome
designed to forestall
the inevitable crush inwards.
And the drilling replay
of the day's sad events
coring down through
the layers of the years
to the tender infant
memories of self,
that bawling apoplectic
red wad of meat,
spit out into this
fast panting world
of ever dawning darkness
and wrecks of dreams,
against its will.
Then the ceaseless tides
of consciousness
pooling soon enough
into stagnant realizations
of being
utterly forlorn,
anguished
and overfilled
with despair.
This mis-carried life,
hammered though with nails,
crucified to being,
infected with the dis-ease
of fifty odd years,
fifty too many,
shivering, feverish,
coughing, vomiting
up every shred of
evanescent pleasure and
always vanishing joy
until the only thing left
to purge itself of
is the bitter bile
of still being here.