Blue Velvet Night

Blue Velvet Night

Not in the mood to be,
the discomfort of a bad diet for years
and a worst case unending sense of dread;
adrenal glands like a leaky faucet,
no medicine to cure what’s wrong,
no savior from without,
no worse enemy within.
Don’t know what I would have done
as a soldier, a priest, a firefighter, a paramedic –
defibrillation, inferno, last rites, war –
times generally deemed inconvenient for defecation.
I broke my nervous system
a decade ago, a stupid youth,
a dumber agenda.
I always feel like I’m about to die,
or speak in public,
stress too great not to surface in one of nine ways
(more often, two), at any time – twitch – and still,
and still, and always, a sense of impending doom,
the Santa Claus promise to a six-year old
of some unknowable horror when next I’m conscious;
foreboding as a war ship with four smoking galleys,
docking with a Cyclops, severed at the neck,
impaled through his eye
on the masthead, dead mermaid
hanging from his mouth.