the monster behind the eyes

The Monster Behind The Eyes
(Trying to Poetize My Chronic Pain)

In this waking nightmare called chronic pain,
I am afraid of a Monster that lurks within me
that I wish I could gamble away.

Let’s call him Firo, and let’s call me Kindle.

Firo spends his every waking hour terrorizing
the villages along my spine,
but his home is somewhere in my mind –
a place I can never quite seem to find.

When Firo is in his mere, normal, foul-fever,
I only have a tiring time of quieting
every scared and hurt villager that comes to me crying.
All that energy and stress is gobbled up and processed…
but it is never anything I’ve ever fought against and lost…

But there are times…sometimes only once or twice a week,
sometimes every, wretched, handful of every hour in a day,
when Firo becomes this frothing-flame-flinging-fury,
the hellfire-demon who attacks my villagers
with all the pent-up rage of an imprisoned Devil,
frozen up to the waist in a lake of ice;
…his beating wings – only solidifying his prison.

These poor villagers, they cannot bear to stand it,
they cry, and they scream, and they beg in my ears,
for every second that Firo rages, and roars, and rips at their heels.

…These are the times that I am at my worst.

…It is during these times I am afraid the most.
Because it is the clamor from my spine
that drowns out the baritone of Reason from my mind.


…and I just can’t seem to think solid, straight, or right.
 
All I can seem to muster are crooked thoughts of
the any ways of appeasing my poor-vilified villagers,
wishing to silence Firo, and his never-ending violence,
for once and for all, so they can have their goodnight…

….

Now, suddenly, I’m the Monster.

I’m doing things I would never do in a quieter mind.

Like,

Being capable of the slight of hand slipping of pain medicine,

similar to vein-slapping, dragon-chasing, addiction-based-actions.

Of waking up wasted, and going to sleep shit-faced.

Of disregarding taking more than I am prescribed,
to shut that fucking Firo up,
to give those constantly-complaining villagers,
their good-god-damn and good-god-given peace.

Of praying to some Super-Hero-God,
to grant me my magical-reprieve,
to grant me my mystical pie in the sky.

and,
,worst of all,
Of debating taking a bottle full of what-the-fuck-ever,
and drowning it down with a bottle full of what-the-hell-ever,
to chance sweet oblivion for a ticket to
the pain-free, forever-and-never-after show.

…

….but it’s only that there’s this brave little voice that can still be heard,
now, only barely…over the din of this diseased, pissed, Monster…

Which is the weakened voice of Reason passionately begging of me,
that I know I cannot gamble on the only thing I ultimately own – my life,
that what I know to be so breathlessly beautiful, and so wordlessly wonderful,
is not a gamble worthy of losing anything as awe-inspiring, such as the southern sunset.

Ignore Pascal. This is My Wager:

There’s the gamble of the nonexistence of the eternal,
of the internal loss of all pain and/or pleasure,
and of some unknowable deal of any(kind of)every(kind of)thing, possibly (un)imaginable…

….Against the gamble of an esoteric Creator, who [I can hope upon faith],
understands just how torturous his Creation can cruelly become,
and [I can hope upon faith] will welcome me,
with [what I can hope upon faith are] eternally forgiving arms…

So, you see,

I’m the Monster, with the chip not worthy of such a large gamble…

I’m the Monster, the only real  Monster, there is to fear in this nightmare.


M. L. Michael 
03/07/11

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