Side Effects
Michael J. Menges
Watching Mannix blast down the heavy,
And I, feeling down and heavy and
waiting to be blasted
(But I am a Man and won’t be nixed--
Nix on Nixon my spinning crazy
Memory recalls grafitti nonsense),
Wonder if bullet holes burn with
the same temperature as mine will.
Body-healing (I think, but am not sure)
Smokescreen-words (jargon, shit) calls it
side Effects, but
All over my interior, cavernous and
hollow, not just my side (or sides),
Fire (effects? agony! another smokescreen
outer, not inner I mean) blazes
Along yellow lines I bitter laughingly
call my nerve-remnants (like dead
cockroach bodies)
Muscles tense, like knotted ropes
ripped as two war ships play anchor-
line tug-of-war,
And my groin hollers as if a
huge crab is pinching my legs,
Sweat Showers me, non-comforting,
neither sweltering sleepy sweat nor
air-condition office to sun-shower sweat,
But ice-cuby interior-tremble-forcing
expire-fearing perspiration drips
and horrifies.
Miserable paradox! Outside cold
from inside heat. And my flesh
the wretched filter.
I sock the TV knob and kill
The announcer, as he intones,
“Richard Himble, convicted of a crime
he did not commitÉ”, and
I burn inside so naturally I
smoke, legs crossed and gripped
like pliers, two puffs and half-gone,
Enduring like a flaming but seemingly
not consumed auto engine, I
mutter, “unconsciousness-difference-
death or sleep, little death or much
sleep”?
Purple alert - on my stomach, in the
bed-trench but fire dying down,
grabbing pillow like drowning
swimmer clutching life-buoy from
sunk battleship.
Smog, no battlesmoke of sleep clouds
my brain with dim relief, like
light from above for trapped
miners underground.
What can you say about a 90-day
agony that died? Thank God but
Desperately struggle to break last
night’s, and the night’s before, and
the night’s before that, etc.
Speed record for bedtime God-
despaired non-religious rituals,
Teeth-gritting, tooth brushing; cold
sweating, undressing, interior-undercoating
burning, wrenching swim-suit on,
I gag on my medication, (shirk I wish
I could these torture pills) so I
will be a relaxed blah, a flesh-and-
entrail fog tomorrow morning.
Yellow alert-fists clenched, back
on sheet, sheet over legs in 90-degree
night, land mines exploding over entrails,
Red alert - on right side, facing
doorway and escape, never facing prison
wall, eyes pushed closed,
bitter memories bomb me;
a true hate and fear story.
