Cowboy Up

image borrowed from bing

Cowboy Up

“Fear is the parent of cruelty.”

--James A. Froude

Those vivid dreams of rats, spiders, and pit vipers,

rooms full of them, a phobic event, a fear carnival,

squirming with pain, paralysis, rabies, and death,

with no spot to step safely, yet this driving need

to walk through them, running the gauntlet 

like a defrocked priest, 

an imprisoned dictator,

a criminal, a pedophile, 

with the clubs, bats and pipes pounding

your arms over your head,

your knees buckling, knowing

you cannot fall,

you must persevere,

you must survive,

to make it to the Mall

where you can accidently disrespect

a ten year old banger who will whip out

a Glock from under his hoodie

and pop several caps in your ass

so that you can linger nearly comatose

in the hallways of some ER because

worse gunshot and knife wounds

usurp your place in line, where

the mournful screams of the innocent

conjure up the madhouses of history,

rife with mouth clamps, ear plugs, and

shock therapy that will send surges

of evil electricity through your extremities,

snapping your limbs into a dervish

of spasmodic jerks, complete loss

of colon control, needing cases of 

adult diapers, their plastic edges poking

out of your drooping pants now

crackling in steaming shart, 

inviting the inevitable insidious infarct,

the satanic stroke that will disconnect

the neural net from your left side,

so that you will drag that inert foot

and flap that dead arm, becoming

an Igor struggling to drag pounds

of bloody chains across filthy dungeon floors,

the metallic screech fueling the aneurism 

that shorts out your speech circuits, as

language lurches out of reach, and you

further degenerate into an unrecognizable

animalistic grunting defecating drooling husk,

a beautiful soul held absolute prisoner

in a shell-shocked mass of carrion flesh,

a tempting host for conniving carcinogens

that will invade what is left of your healthy cells,

burning them char-black with cancer, eating

you from the inside out, their countless blackened

sharp teeth chewing your guts into pulled pork,

before letting devilish diabetes bring its fiendish 

delights to the body wake, first bursting the blood vessels

in your retina, filling the vitreous with red pulp, 

the garrulous gift of blindness as another challenge,

setting up the scene for the series of amputations,

toes, feet, lower legs--fingers, hands, forearms,

all riddled with neuropathy and decaying rot,

to finally arrive looking like the Kafkian cockroach,

on your back, limbless, blind, mute, with edema

pressing against the weakening walls of your heart,

at the Big Transition, the slimy sill of death’s door,

only to be held back for days, as you are taunted,

ridiculed, cajoled, and invited to saunter through

the viscus veil in order to re-learn the truth

about eternity.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-Poetics

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