Bloodd || Passions ||Divertissements || Jivepuppi

    This introduction will hurt no one but the reader,
    let me attempt a corneal scraping, to
    harvest the living clear skin of your eyes to
    abrade with wizened fingertips the layer that
    protects your instruments of witness - Peel me a grape.

    Our retinas are the attestants to our secret histories
    a thin basin encrusted with tiny rods and pyramids
    a film of dancing light and shadow
    synchronized to the solar beat
    of the ever-fibrillating pulse of day
    to the cadence of
    the plumes of solar flares.
    Sunspots are islands of ash that swim among the flames
    of the never-blinking day
    until when in day’s inversion, when befallen by dreams, 
    these scrims detach to frolic like Bacchianalian ghosts

    The globes of your eyes bob about in a chalice of burgundy
    stripped of their lids,
    anchored by their optic nerves
    saturated in spirits,
    they are always looking upwards
    ever focussed on the heavens


    Adjacent to the county morgue is the office of an apprentice
    who inventories wounds,
    cataloguing their descriptions
    or, in circumstances criminal, cataclysmic, or for his students’ edification,
    he pickles them.
    Rattling his rolling ladder down corridors of shattered bones,
    he looks looks over and oversees
    preservation jars packed with bullet holes,
    the entryways to pierced flesh
    testaments to the gaping emptiness of punctured lives
    stored in jelly-jars
    vacuum burped and sealed with wax.

    He will tell you, “There are no exit wounds.
    Even the casual torments of life leave behind disfigured souls.”      He catalogues how Wounds heal and how they don’t.  
    and how,
    when they’re not repaired,
    they reconfigure us. 

    We become the scrabbled and hobbled creatures of their impact, twisted rearrangements of convalescing flesh, blasted by wounds that invade us through our eyes, that incise the meat of our brains, that numb our tongues, until, at last, our speaking functions are silenced. 

    The two eyes and tongue comprise three of the five organs of witness.

    The antidote is the perfect poem,
    but this ideal can never be composed,
    and so we must consume scraps of broken verse,
    chewing on the prescription pad
    desperate to achieve a slight release.

    And so we grope and touch and stroke and squeal with the exuberance of a blind man who discovered his guide dog of all these years was in reality a loyal, lonely woman, an always friend.  Meanwhile, his companion comes to believe her master is a dog.  Together they perform an act banned in thirty states:  they read to each other. 

    This book is about amnesia.  That sort of blessing you would bang your head a thousand times to attain.
    This book is about the analgesia that comes from the pulped and pestled barks, the best that pharmacognosy and verse have to offer.

    This book is about the withdrawal of analgesia, how the rebound spikes in our EEGs can make our hair rise to attention until the priapic strands finally curl in tiny hairgasms 
    and about
    How, when awakened from its slumber, the dracunculus beast will swim along our veins until it can borrow our optic nerves to witness and weep at all it sees.  And then, at last, it will invade our trident tongues to sing a three-layered poem.  

Copyright © 2006 martin david hill