Dominic Fox

Seven Pits (work in progress)


Beginning like ending an improper severance --
the cut thread frays, the dancing cable crackles
across the worktop. Onward under sufferance

towards no known end, pioneer of feckless
consecration, brusque kickstarting tyro,
spatter-gowned convener of debacles:

just see if you can swing this, until giro
cashed at least: make straight-backed riverdance
swish move to exit, grinning down El Toro.

***

Severance packaged as opportunity
for self-improvement; for remediation,
transplanted thriving, fresh immunity.

I am again myself after a fashion:
aspie, neurotic, wilfully acute;
shrinking from rancour as from radiation

of that last meltdown. I had thought
aspie meant serpentine, or rather dry:
as shed snake-skin, as dying rasp of drought.

***

Drought being metaphor, scorched to the letter,
do well with similes; reduce to clear
in moments, like a microwave through butter.

Take visionary upsight as a near-
cousin of perception, perhaps ill-
bred: given to trances, to obscure

utterance, to scarcely convivial
fits and moods. Show antisocial splitter
hell-bent on self-enrichment, going fissile.

***

Trance may be overstating it -- try dazed
auto-hypnosis, low-level mania
sparking within the cloud, transport confused

with tiredness; neural extemporanea
freaking the cortex, everything running down.
No need for draught of laudanum, or zanier

lysergic brain-melt bringing vision on
like migraine aura. I am indisposed
by dint of instress, nursing a damaged crown.

***

Indisposed, that is, by innermost
disposition; or perhaps hormonal
balls-up wrongly diagnosed as lost-

Eden complex -- sheen of kitchen-vinyl
drying in sunlight being the Eden I
cycle back to. Be it ingrown kernel

or stock implant, perennial sci-fi
premise, there is memory at last
to cling to or set down beside the way.


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