Epic of the Six Darknesses: V

Painting by Jim Warren


Epic of the Six Darknesses: V


V

The fourth darkness follows soon after:
the fourth darkness of doors.
These are doors with no doorknobs,
the kind that shut you up in little rooms
because you won't stop shouting:

Door #1 is the womb–door
locked tight against the world.
Nothing comes in, nothing gets out.

Door #4 is the drug–door
on this door I float outside myself
outside the world
like a magic carpet or
a balloon umbilical ripped from the hand
cut loose from the universe.

Door #9 is my mother–door
and I bang on it bang on it
let me out

Door #16 is the skin–door
when the cells grab hold of bone
so the marrow boils bright

Door #25 is the fever–door
the delirium of poetry
as words light their fires in the mind
and the poet rattles the signifying chain.

These are the doors of darkness
come to suck the mind nipple
drink deep the dopamine
wallow in the mud madness

each one takes a lobe into its mouth
multifoliate like a rose
lips with infinite surface
a topological triumph
they enwrap the entire brain
so that every thought has to knock
upon a thick woody door
before crossing the fleshhold
into the synapse
that place of the between.


Richard Smyth

Posted over on Anabiosis Press