Michael Monroe

Mummified

You look at me
and probably see a nice, geeky guy
with a kind face and glasses
who dresses nice in a preppy sort of way.

If you look longer,
you might see the memories:
the nights wrapped in love’s sweet shadow,
long walks in the moonlight,
promises of silken lives
shrouded in mist-like dreams of happiness.

If you look even longer,
you might see some scars:
the claw marks where my heart once was,
torn out and trampled,
left for vultures
to pick away at the remaining bloody chunks.

You might see the holes from the needles
as I lay in a hospital bed
with a gaping cavity in my flaming stomach
the size of a human fist,
burning pain like sword thrusts
and repeated punches like thuds
into my weak abdomen.

You might see the marks left
by nights spent howling
with yearning at the blazing moon,
searching boarded-house streets,
bare feet on broken glass,
searching for cocaine and ecstasy in the blood,

pouring vodka over the wounds and screaming,
bones scratched by the sandpaper
of vice-headed fever addiction,
like cymbals crashing into my head,
fists plowing into my face repeatedly
as I reach for a sexual explosion,
a soul-blazing bipolar orgasm.

Maybe you’ll see the car wreck jagged metal,
mangled limbs and bar fights,
white knuckles smashing my face like concrete
and my own knuckles lumping their faces
like raw meat, bruises throbbing
and eyes blazing hatred.

Maybe you’ll see cops pointing guns at me,
a millisecond away from splattering my brains
onto the brick wall I’m smashing my fists into,
stopped only by an old friend’s intervention.
I stayed up all night in my concrete jail cell,
puking bile into the shit-caked metal toilet.

Maybe you’ll see a skull
grinning at you sadistically,
and possibly cackling a little,
as I mummify myself in a pale cocoon,

but blink and look again,
and you’ll probably see a nice, geeky guy
with a kind face and glasses
who dresses nice in a preppy sort of way.

The Straw Man

Pieces of me fall through my fingers
as I try to hold myself together,
stumbling through a dark museum
of wax figures with bent smiles
and the fossilized dreams of broken artists.

I put the pieces back inside me,
as if I were stuffing straw into a shirt,
preparing myself once more
for reality’s sword fighting practice.
I make a formidable foe in my own mind.

In reality I am a straw man,
and the swords hit hard like hurricanes.
Rejection comes in waves of rain
that soak my damp clothes.
It freezes in the winter night.

The warriors come again the next morning
with sharpened swords and heavy maces,
ready for practice once more.
As they hit me like boulders and pass,
I notice that they are mirrors.

I hold the pieces before they fall
to the damp, trampled floor,
and begin my wandering once again,
hoping to learn something new
as I stumble through the dark museum.