Blister (Poem)

Blister like the calloused hands of Sisyphus.

Like the back of Ixiom,

like the stomach of Erysichthon,

like the lips of Tantalus,

like the labia of Pasiphae.

Blister,

like the doubt,

that burns the skin of Orpheus,

seeking the face of Eurydice.

And turning,

distrust hot upon your feverish brow,

your beloved fades and falls,

with all your shadowy hopes,

back into the winding sheet of the underworld.

But Hades warned you, Great Warrior,

yet your disbelief was an acid taste

you could not wash from off your tongue.

On that long, now lonely, trek from the land of the dead,

you will feel the guilt blister, like the memory of her breath

on the back of your neck.

A deep remembrance, an utterance, a zephyr of tendril scents,

like olfactory echoes, a mix of decay and the perfume of Ophelia’s bouquet.

The sweet smell of wounds,

never allowed to heal,

so often broken open by fingers;

these ten blades we use to aggravate the abscesses that ooze the iniquity of our own inky, Tartarean, warmongering.

The sieges and wars we wage on our own selves.

These weeping ulcers that paint us like lepers,

where we have dared to reach out and seek the burning heart,

a deed even the gods cannot undertake,

and so they punish us for our aspirations.

For we are corporal and impermanent bodies,

and our histories are but petty instants in the epics that spill the stories of the stars.

And so, when we reach, we know it is futile.

And that our mother Eternity,

will never remember why we have suffered here,

our hearts blistering like plague buboes,

in these insignificant seconds we name these chronicles our own.

Yet, underneath this sadistic subjugation,

by the weight of time and the pitiless hands of the old gods,

still we reach.

And these bitter deities,

their timelessness a burden

that cannot comprehend

how stars might choose a momentary flare,

only to smolder and burn out,

they then call out these hopes as our human conceit,

and offer no balm or salve to ease our pockmarked carcasses.

For it is we who have stubbornly, and immutably,

since our time in ancient gardens,

ignored their warnings and wisdoms,

and transgressed against their counsel.

It is we who have known the punishments,

the blistering,

for trying to swallow the whole of Helios,

yet like infants,

forever violently born,

we reach out towards the blazing sun.

And we burn,

and we blister,

our flesh like flower petals,

open.

bvk, 2018.