DUNGEON…A Type One Daughter Survives Alcoholism
by Michael Naylor
You visited last night
and a casket had you in its grips
death holding you tight, squeezing
blood from the stone of your heart
you, wrapped in an iron veil.
Casually you mentioned
you had another day when death
wanted you.
Or you wanted it.
No mind.
And the words of Don Juan
floated up like spirit on the wind:
“You must fight against death till
the very end. It is the warrior’s way.”
And from separate ships we gazed
across deep waters speaking in foreign
tongues
our words bouncing away
not touching.
There is an echo of loneliness
stinging the air between us.
Piranha gnash their teeth in the silence.
I suggested that when death came
to call it out, smash it
kill something in reply
fight it tooth and nail
haunt “it” rather than be haunted,
Stalk it!!
slit its throat, be deadly
and you said you quietly held it in
a cyclone blowing in your brain,
you straining against this gale force with silence
is a rare form of madness,
Dammit, grab a knife and start slicing
let the psychic blood flow
split the vampire in two
You must before your blood
runs dry and you are wilted with
discouragement.
I tossed a jewel into your heart
I never heard it hit bottom
Did it vanish sideways out the
door of hopelessness.
Did the echo of breaking glass
splintering your ears like needles
hurl the jewel against the wall
like hope was hurled from you
as a little girl.
God dammit, grab it the
next time it comes!!
I say you stalk the hidden places
that run along the edges of walls
the invisible corridor that runs
parallel to open space
where your walking goes unnoticed
your presence collecting like dust motes
in the corner.
You, practiced in the art of disappearance
blending like furniture into the landscape of
a room.
It is uncanny how you do this.
So quiet you barely emit a whisper
and like the softest light you creep
through, never letting on,
never really saying,
and you distract yourself in the ways of
honesty
carrying a big stick
you blow to smithereens all forms
of external dishonesty
while another wind whispers
in and out of
the crevices of your soul
curling a hidden story of death
around the edges of your life.
Ah, it is tricky business this stalking
honesty.
You have trained and honed
this art, become it,
this disappearing
this capacity to move about
so still in the silence, so quiet in the
moving
that no one knows to inquire
or how to pierce the veil,
the magic screen you have
molded so well.
It is a work of art
and yet by its very nature it
starves you of the deepest art
Everything catches in it and stops
held in abeyance by an ancient script
of crashing glasses thrown against
walls, shattering against your silence,
or voices raised and burning like
hot stones into your delicate loving
heart that hungers for the deepest
kindness
And somehow is now woven into
a breathtaking koan
a hall of mirrors that runs you
silent, quiet, hidden
and you, in the world but not of it.
So that what you survived now
strangles you.
It is hideous in its unfairness.
And if you get so silent, so still
so much like quiet wind,
does the heavy heart of sorrow
sit easier, less noticed, less piercing
so that this Tai Chi like presence
rather than awakening you
keeps the pain nestled somewhere deep.
I say there is a snake coiled there
guarding the gate
where thorns that riddled your heart
have yet to be plucked, weeded
burnt with the fierceness of your passion
for life.
The snake has a feverish eye…
and keeps you pacing pacing pacing.
jumping to some internal tune that
cuts like blades in the walls of your soul.
You must kill the snake, snap its head
when it begins to hiss
and like snow sliding off the edge
of the leaf, heavy with winter,
the dungeon door will slide open…
