Poem: Aubade

Five-Finger Exercise: Aubade

Somedays you wake up
and your stomach's not right,
your head is heavy,
there's a burning at the tip of your esophagus
and too much mucous in your throat
(mucous is protective, you know)
and your skin is on fire but you don't know why--
maybe it's all the medications.

You have an urge to move your bowels
though not strong enough to push;
you are not sick or hungover
just feeling limp, inauthentic
as the time you shook hands
with someone you no longer cared about
who still cared about you--duplicitous,
trapped like a stone in a Japanese garden
whose grand design you don't believe in.

You can't see it without a helicopter
but the fumes make you sick;
you lean out the flimsy door
far above the garden and perceive no design,
wonder if a few trolls might westernize it
then discard the idea.

The mucous in your throat rises,
your esophagus burns.
You ask the pilot to land
and he lands right in the garden
next to the stone you are.


A deductive, confessional, closed poem--rough, rough first draft.


Until tomorrow (hope I'm feeling better),

CE