Black Siesta Poem by Shikhandin Shikhandin

There are days when I choke. Like a turtle
With a plastic bag gagging my throat.
This is the stuff of black inertia. Inert afternoon.
Fighting the nausea of memories.
Fighting what will not die even after
it has been hacked and burnt. The ashes buried
in a salt pit.

I swim backwards through space-time.
I am the object in a flip book being flipped back
to the very start of biographic action.
I am caught in an unwilling universe
in which my life erupts like pox, leaving
their sick odors behind. Those days

I simply hit my bed
grown soup warm from sun cooked air
seeping in through the bedroom walls.
Itchy blanket of afternoon shrouds me. I
shut my eyes. Let sleep come
in a sudden heap of dread. Let my mind
sink down to its most sedimentary layer.
Roll my tongue over the fur of inchoate thoughts.

When I have choked enough.
Near drowned and grown unnerved, I summon
strength that I never believed I possessed. And then
it's time to fling myself back
on the shingly shores of present tense,
the dusty vacuum of wakefulness.

When I awake
I awake to confront
another kind of death.

(First Published in Gutter Eloquence, USA)