A
little preface to this poem, my husband and I are those crazy people that love
to run out in the middle of a thunderstorm to get closer to the thunder and
lightening. So here’s to being stupid together, you’re my favorite babe! But
more particularly, this poem was in inspired by one night in particular when my
life, when I lived in Michigan, was turned upside down and I was so upset that
I couldn’t sleep and went out for a run alone at four in the morning. I was
running for only a short time before thunder and lightening crashed down around
me, so loud I could barely hear myself think. And I was so captivated I stopped
running and I just stood there, lost in it and forgetting myself.
I am stuck,
Stuck in the perpetual lack,
Stuck in an immortal insufficiency of meaning,
Where love is the trigger, the goad,
A steeping sickness of risky raptures,
In the tangled twist of a torturing thirst
That shoves me down to suffocate, soulless,
in spite.
Haunted in the linguistic labor of hate,
The heart murmurs morsels of maybes,
Heaves and shudders “If I were more...”s
And a theatrical idiocy devours me up,
In a fervent need for function,
For that practised perversion:
perfection.
Crushed in contortion, the head and the heart
Mumble and crumble in worldliness,
Until thunder cracks me canon-clapped,
With the murderous howl the dark cotton rumbles
And as it bursts silver I break in the beauty
To unlatch self from self,
And rip out the desperate depth,
Of corrupted lungs.
Reborn in the unstoppable storm
fractured fire forms me in wondrous worth,
Like the dawn that broke the dark,
I am lost in a sound too large to bear,
And blinded in the roaring ruckus,
Blinded to the world, tangled tremulous,
In the wreckless racket.
© Alison Zacharias 2013
