Last night,
trying to chop
some kindling
in the dark,
the hatchet's blade
found my forefinger
instead of wood.
A sudden, exquisite
explosion of pain
sliced through
the cold night air;
an abrupt blast
of self-awareness.
There is nothing
like the shock
of your own blood,
dripping red,
to remind you
that your mortal
mammal body
is still breathing,
your all too
human heart
still beating.
- mce
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Pain of slicing flesh and bone does it compare to the broken heart that keeps your mortal mammal body breathing alone?
ReplyDeletePoetry is a distillation of memory, experience and imagination. I go to my past for raw material, but what I create with it isn't reportage.
ReplyDeleteIt's more an attempt to make a new reality that contains, but transforms the old. Thus, while my heart has been broken (a few times) and I may refer to that, it doesn't mean that I walk around suffering. Actually, my heart is in pretty good shape at the moment.
:)
This poem is more about the fact that we all do a lot of sleep walking and a sudden jolt is sometimes necessary to shock us into the awareness that we are physical beings who live in a physical world. If we pay attention, it can be a very vivid world.
Thanks for the comment.