anatomy

the link between brain, heart, throat and abdomen....

RE-BEGOT

Please don’t ask me how I feel
because I don’t think you’ll believe me.
What I feel is bigger than me, inside and outside me,
dark matter swallowing and swallowed;
weight of heavy heart
pulls down rocks and torrents
in blackness full of violent motion.
Her death: event horizon.
My grief: crossing where I’m torn apart.

Tell people you are colour blind, have tunnel vision
and astigmatism
But expect no tolerance for mind’s eye
seeing differently, too.
Some, depressed, tell of blankness,
a desert without contours
where all they feel is not to feel.

Others fall from mountains in the mind,
and that is mine,
those cliffs of fall
into the abyss,
The black hole
The aching void.
This is not hyperbole.
Poets did not lie.
They described the topograpy
and barology of sentience.

This is what I see,
when I’m awake,
walking to the shops,
waiting for the bus.
Darkness of rocks,
crags and jagged spikes
at the rim of a chasm.
Scratching at crevices
to gain a breath
on the way down
Landing,
I see anthracite gloss
of stones on a wall;
pool in a cave.

Beside myself,
I hunker there,
viewing my own derangement,
before another fall.
There are always
other falls.
Peering into shadows,
I see I have no face.
Blurred, simplified,
I am amoeba
in the cracks
on the sides
of a chasm.

Reflux of acid
every hour of the day.
Pulling in the bowels,
centre of emotions,
not that pumping muscle
called heart –
ugly red tuberous thing
of stems and branches –
oh, there we go,
it is the subterranean garden
of how I feel
after all.

Is that what’s pushed up,
lump in the throat
that won’t come out?
Or, fragmented,
floats past in mind’s eye?
I am atomized.
Head through glass
smashing impulse
is clarifying relief
from the deafening
cosmic scream.

This anatomy of grief
(science beyond me)
teases me to wiki
Vagus nerve,
and there we have it,
the link between
brain, heart, throat
and abdomen.
It even secretes its own
Vagusstoff.

What you are and how you love
is in your gut, the first centre
of our feeling,
our oldest brain.
Human entrails shine in the forest.

Please don’t ask me how I feel,
I’m afraid you will turn away.
The one who loved me most
could bear the least.
He saw too much:
sewer rats piled dead
in the old dolls' house
didn’t scare him;
zombie woman did.
                            “You’re drowning,
                               wanting me
                               to save you.
                                       I don’t know
                                        if I can
                                         love you
                              anymore.”

THE YEARNING GARDEN