Watermelon Vomit On Red Hibiscus Poem by James Murdock

1.
Watermelon vomit on red hibiscus.
After a long week at work I went
straight for the rum. And Jenna fed
daddy a skerrick of letup. I got all
unused to myself on the back porch,
mosquito resistant nets.

I thought the fruit and some cool water
would save me, but there I was in a
multi-colored dream spiral, so tired and
couldn't even close my sick eyes, swore
I was dying but at least the baby was
sleeping tight by 10.

Because there I was all drooped on the
wood steps, gazing at those strange blooms
and wishing I had better sense than to
cut loose so hard. Mother Nature
had poured her summer-sweet-sweat all
over my fragile white face. I thought,

Jesus—where are you, Jesus, at a time so
desperate and mean? I was supposed to
be a good daddy in 8 hours and had
worked my way down on my knees into the
nightly grasses, sticking a finger down my
throat right in front of those alien upside-
down lilies.

And after two rounds of the watery red fruit
vomit, I slithered my way, sweaty wet flesh,
in through the kitchen, cold as ice and horizontal.
I made the bed sticky with a sloshy aberrance.
For it is pain that makes us real and fear that
make us wriggle.

There could be no thought that night of
responsibility or emails or the poisonous trash
I'd eaten or the great poisons of the earth
gone wrong—not without falling down into
the coma of my terrible drunken disease.


2.
There are times when we are not meant to
look into the eyes of humanity's shallow
enlightenments. And so we require a stock
of unearthly substance to purge them all right
then and there.

We return to our dreams to remember our
raw and plain natures. So it can be the poisons
of America united with the fruits and cool waters
of earth that bring us to our knees at the atoning
alter of backyard flower beds.

America's pills are all pure poison. They rescind
life as they salvage it. All that is sacred here is the
open book of Nature. Oh America and all her anti-
Nature!Silently they drag you down the spiral
of their synthetic exterior stairway.

Down down they creep the spiral until they are
lost forever outside themselves. Lost to the quiet
narcotic doldrums of infinite space. Wholly Indian
and entheogen is the land underneath America.
When down the spiral I begin to slink, those
alien lilies call to me of paradise.