Boiling Oats

Atomistic intolerant odors assault her senses

and fill the applesauce jar with this thin yellow yeast

that slowly fans out in the gentle gyrations of his flailing arms and legs

and vibrates the whale-like blubber in his thighs.

Black and blue and bile brown belly waves weave back and forth

like seaweed covered jellyfish feeding on the plankton between his legs.

Her nose cringes and buckles under the strain

of lifting the heavyweight heroes of another era,

when saltines were crisp and salty

and the acrid stench of bleach brought tears to your eyes.

He walks like a zombie in his stiff rubber undergarment clinging to his moist flesh.

He no longer remembers his true self in the aftermath of madness

and the prelude to dessication.

She is a duty-bound faithless healer with no religious compunction

to see her through the nightmarish dreams of shockwaves

racing through the tangled threads in this brain.

Alcoholic fumes fill the air and feed the flames while

she counts out little tiny tablets that merely hold off the inevitable.

The timer dings, and he vomits, like boiling oats tumbling out of the microwave and

sloshing on the floor and the milky hot soup baking the white tiles yellow

like the musty brown stains hidden in the closet underneath the stairs.

Aromatic, perfumed, disinfected, bleached blind and deaf and dumb

in raw thyroid stew and diabetic diseased organs.

Slowly losing it all, the mists descending, the taut sinews busting and snapping,

the smoothly sanded surface glossy like marble but soft as pudding

with brown spots marking the advanced stages of desperation

hanging on by a thread of his rapidly diminishing faculties.

This is her bear to cross, her giant grizzly hairdo singing slothly lullabies

to its innocent owner, determined to keep her sleepless,

senseless and in fairness to all concerned a wee bit selfish.

Knock on the door and there's no one there.

Just ghosts and demons and spiders hiding in the corners

feeding their brood with freshly regurgitated prey,

tending their carefully wrought cobwebs

where careless flies with greenish diamond eyes

struggle to breathe through their sphincters

their last gasp before the venom takes hold.

This is the Way, the Means, the terrible tragedy and indignity,

passing away in the moonlit night before dawn's dews cool the fevered brow.

And so it goes, each ghost going to rebirth, sucked back into the womb,

the waste fluids preceding them, the urine and the feces and the blood,

until you knock on the door and there's no one there.