The small steel circle pressed against
the back of my head could have
opened up a whole
new world-red flashing down
corridors of hospitals and churches
and earth that leads to
the deathless realm of the dead,
the door to which is everywhere
so easily opened, living
tremblingly just below the world
we live in and think will last
forever. But this is just
a heat mirage of everything we’ve
wished for and feared, the mind’s
rough elaboration
of itself in the shape of a city, filled
with stray obsessive thoughts
colliding and recombining,
crowding each other out or hunting
each other down. Which thought
was he an embodiment of,
the man who stepped out of the night
like a feverish piece of the night
itself and jammed a gun
against my head? The wish to be
released from all thinking,
granted at last? The need
to enter a world other than this one,
more lasting and more real? Or
my own unacknowledged
fury unleashed, years ago, and come
full circle now to find its source
in the fear in my eyes?
Leave a Reply