Exhaustion


I lie down in the Dark Ages, another night deficient in ecstasy.
I'm tired of the old laws and the new laws and the laws they've been thinking
up between breakfast and delirium.
I might as well be driving a dog sled in the white waste of Alaska, mukluks
still feral on my feet,
Or sliding a two-ton truck through Alabama mud, a seizure of fiddles on the
radio and a bumper sticker that says: Living in a vacuum sucks.
The world's run short of taffeta and courtesy and grass widows with a gamy
scent.
And where are you, bare spark at the flash point, when I need the moony
spasms of release?
I'm tired of all the stagestruck mothers with little Hamlets in the womb, and
those snakehandlers whipping Jesus in the lead with their rattlers and
cottonmouths.
And I'm worn out from the terror, the gruesome excuses for a heart packed
in dry ice and a flag strung up by the neck.
The heart frightens me, too, the way it motors off on its own, with no backup,
no redundant systems for the pump.
So what's the weather like in the otherworld? Same today as the last eternity
— nothing changes where everything's changed.
Even the Bible's been divided into tongues, from the Aramaic all the way to
gangster slang: So they brung him down the cross, and the guy's already
colder than a Jersey whore.
And what about you? Idle hands, when I could use another volunteer to stir
the fleshpots.
I've survived the drumrolls and the German sense of humor and the bloody
flux — why isn't it someone else's turn to pull the temple down?
I'm not feeling world-historical tonight, though I can still smell the stench of
a rotten hypothesis, like eggheads left out too long in the sun.
My mind's one wrinkle away from ravenous black — spiders in the brainpan,
and all circuits down on the motherboard.
And I'm so tired of death shouldering his scythe across the fields,
grasshoppers leaping from his bony toes.
Give me freshets from the belly; quicken my desire by some strange order
of magnitude; fix me a poultice to bring the swelling down.
The hour already feels tainted and ancient. And then, at the low stroke of
the soul, you come.


Elton Glaser