For 2011's National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), Troy's Work Table is attempting to write thirty poems in thirty days without the help of writing prompts from other websites.
Many of these are still in some sort of draft stage, but that is the nature of the Work Table.
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REVELATION
When I was a young child, I had a vision, a reoccurring dream of myself seated upon a wheelchair throne, my legs withered and crippled like well-burned matchsticks that would support neither weight nor mass. The brittleness of those quiet legs was matched with its polar opposite, a grizzled yet glorious lion, the lion of Judah (I knew it to be so!) that stalked my kingdom of circles, coming ever closer with each pass, a satellite in free fall.
When I was a youth, I waited with anxiety and anticipation as the cloud of radioactive debris from the failed Chernobyl nuclear reactor inched ever closer to my own country, my own neighborhood. It was on that day that my lung spontaneously collapsed while practicing calculus problems, limits and the like. As I lay on the hospital gurney, I felt the snuffing of the lion’s muzzle wet and warm against my ear even though I couldn’t see him through the pain and delirium. I kept staring up into the moist eyes of my parents, waiting for the muscular jaws of the lion, the lion of Judah (I knew it to be so!) to grab my throat ever so gently between his incisors and clamp down firm and forever, to mouth a farewell to my grieving mother and father, to listen for the crunch of bone on bone, vertebrae against skull, to wait for the wheelchair or whatever comes next.
When I was a man, I leaned over the bathroom sink, strands of pink phlegm dripping from my lips after a sustained-siege-fit-of-coughing, my chest tight and burning, my face red and verging on oxygen-depleted violet. I knew it wouldn’t be the wheelchair that I would inherit, even though interpretation of one’s own dreaming is dangerous, hybristic. From the shadows of the hallway door, I heard the soft padding of paws, the sniffing of the air, seeking my scent, the frail and tired stink that clung to my clothes and hair.
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Copyright © 2011 by Troy's Work Table
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