A professor of electrocution came to visit one day.
I opened the front door to a macabre display that scorched my eyes
and I forgot for a moment to despise a king.
A blast of gale force wind from gigantic flapping black wings
near knocked me over. Reeling back I almost fell
but fighting through the force I barely kept upright.
Black the many things I saw dangling off his dirty raiments.
A burnished broche of shredded privacy hung on his chest,
like pickled cabbage in pots for sauerkraut I cook.
The narrowest path of blood red dripped from this broche;
I thought I heard muffled cries, as scream the half-dead
when pillows are held down over curly heads of grownup dreams.
The stench was unmistakable. A caterpillar crawled above his
sneering upper lip and crackling wheezes sounded him in broken bones.
Just then I saw dart behind his head the blackest raven of monstrous dread.
He leaned forward to take a step inside, and jangling just like my nerves,
belched and lurched like a drunk, and cackling as he failed
the straight-line test, he reached for my throat.
With a shock I slammed the door to close him out,
but his toe stuck inside, insistent and unmoved.
No amount of trying would unleash his hold,
back him up, and banish him.
I took a different tack, but no amount of cheering up
did right my sinking ship or stop my fall into the pit,
and so I fell. Bereft of hope, I found a way to cope without it,
stay in the game, and not give up. Just do it, someone said, go on.
Hold that door shut, toe inside, and write your poems lamenting times like this
and never let him see you sweat. And so the struggle went,
wrestling with the demon, burned blood spilled on the floor, gasping from
a window stuck shut in hellish desert heat, beaten down—but never giving up.