i’m hardly ever sure
of the things i write and whether
i should have written them

but this was a writhing
phosphorescent worm
and here it is for better or for worse

and then i'm in the ambulance
and the sun is sinking
everything wells up in the corners

trembles for a moment

and spills out over the brim

there are bits of me rattling
in the ice bucket riding along beside me
held just beyond my peripherals

it is pink like the smudged and drowning sun

the traffic extends beyond the limits
of the pain killers they gave me

it starts as a slow radiating burning sting
where my fingers used to be
around the open end of my hand

under the loosely draped bandage
delineating what is clearly no longer there

the throbbing starts gently
in and around and out
through the clipped nubs of bone

and at the base of my brain a slow ignition
a smoldering notion that catches fire
and explodes into an enormous conflagration

none of this will ever be the same
none of me will ever be the same

i’m pressed up against a yawning uncertainty

i lose my breath in that ambulance

rumbling through traffic
toward rescue and salvation
toward painkillers, stitches, and steel pins,

toward missing bones, muscles, and fingertips
toward dead nerves, shredded vessels, and tendons

toward that big and terrible loss
toward the next me

i step outside and my mind goes blank.
all I planned to do vanishes.

i feel this sense of prolonged absence like I've been away.
away but not gone.

a familiar stranger.
a nagging feeling of incompleteness.

the distance felt of what I was
and what I have become;
am becoming.

i trust that my labors are hallowed,
propelled by an unfathomable deity.

not by the god you profess to know
or the one you swear to understand.

but by the gods yet to be discovered,
for there must be a multitude
hidden in the sacred toils.

a bestowing benevolence with
ten thousand and one faces,

slowly uncovered and illuminated
from within the hypogea of
the glacially beating heart
and from the pitch of the cavernous mind,

teased out in meticulous detail
with crude and obscene tools.