Burn Notice
By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 7/24/08
Perhaps because we cannot stop feeling sleepy,
We do not weep when the skies continue to darken,
A drop in blood sugar, regulating the dosage of our alarm.
And yet, interminable fires, interminable smoke,
Keeps creeping down these late reproachful hours,
Morning, noon, and night, constantly encircling
The body of a figure with desperate, uplifted arms.
Such is the human brain’s persistence
In amputating, like a leg, its own emotions,
In hobbling it own immense ability to love.
Afterwards, the clinician can label this aversion
As a disintegration of body-integrity,
Brought on by the planet itself, its skies’
New coarse covering no longer a stimulation for the spirit,
But a nimble, warning motion, on one leg only,
A grotesque trick, a knack, a pyromaniac’s
Smoky preparation for an obsolete medicinal
Intervention, whose effects are so primitive,
So crippling, and so unworthy of revival,
That suddenly we feel an overwhelming urge
To preserve wood, to peel away the bark
Of an adolescent tree, to discover, if behind
All this roughness and conflagration,
There might still be a smooth, moist,
Flesh-like texture, something we might caress,
And apologize to, so that the burning limbs
Of so many sons and daughters will not infect
Our sleep and mutilate our dreams.
But we are so, so sleepy, and perhaps, even
The clinician is already asleep, so that when these
Flaming ghosts stand before us, making red medleys
Of their shifting accusations, we cannot defend ourselves,
But must allow their whole, slowly
Revolving atmosphere of burning, bewitching green
To scarify us with such ruddy insistence,
So that nothing can remain to distinguish
Sleep from waking, but these manifest vituperations,
These prayers for something to drench the heart with grief.
