In Search of Nakedness

And is there always one more glove?
Undershirts are hardest to remove.
I wear one under ribs; it binds
The lungs, holds the heart
Apart. Sometimes a belt behind
The navel straps my tumbling guts
Into a safe cylinder. Sometimes
A shoulder harness holds
An iron-horse anger, sometimes
Old Halloween masks stifle crying
Till my head hurts from smiling.

Even thighs turn stovepipe
Like loggers' leggings against cottonmouths,
Cold iron rusting in the joints,
Pale calves cowed into fear
Above marble-frozen feet.

Sometimes the gloves seem mail.
Knuckles clank that terrible
Quarter-inch from untouchable reality.
Elbow-spikes squeak every move.
 
Yet eyes and ears are naked to the world,
Swords run through them into amplified
Echoes down the winding walk.
There is nothing I don't hear:
The smallest pulse of fear, the smallest gnat,
Needles my meters like a spark.

Days I want to strip off skin and all,
Die boom in bare nerves -- all at once,
The world life love pain and death.

But then I think yes it's enough
To strip the necessary clothes, unbreathe,
And in my skin lie naked
Next to naked night.

        -- Gerald Grow

For years, more than anything I feared feeling numb -- not feeling. Episodes of this alienation (which may have been protective withdrawals from being too skinless) left me in a state of misery I fought with all my energy and intelligence -- which were exactly the wrong weapons -- like Satan in Paradise Lost.   It took years of searching, working, and pure dumb luck to discover gentler ways to navigate beyond the desperation that numbness stirred in me. Like so many things, it is no longer where I live but has become a permanent feature of the landscape I live on. Step carefully: It's ... right ... over ... there ... As the following poem reflects, sometimes I was driven to desperate states in my epic quest for the contentment of being ordinary.

Carrion-Birth

These hands are dead:
I bite at them and chew
Putrescent flesh. Strange,
In all this stench, I taste nothing.
Bone against tooth -- the small fine
Crunch of fingers, knot of knuckle
Harder, harder -- shatters into dust.
Each stiff joint picked of the lifeless flesh,
Each clean bone broken.

I am sick of being dead.

Those feet that never really were my own
Are prickly as a pickerel, sweet fine meat
Of a chicken's neck. So many bones,
They cool before half chewed.
Arms hung limp for so long, now
Into the grinders. No exceptions.
Everything goes through the jaws.

Blubbery paunch, like spooning down
Pudding mixed with boiled tripe.
So many lumps in the gut, a sausage
Of kinks. All that shit too will go through again,
In case I missed something the first time
From being afraid. But not any more.

I wrench ribs apart like wrestling down
An enemy to tear old hatreds
Limb from limb so the air can get in, and breathe,
And, flushed with panting, find he is someone
I have always loved. Lungs I stretch
Like dough before devouring.

There are strange sticky organs here I never knew.
I taste them all, my tongue is alive
With liver, salt-sweet with raw kidney,
Veining down a tough blue spaghetti in blood sauce.

Penis makes me pause: spongy half-me.
But everything must be born again. The balls
Squish sweet rotten juice.
Everything goes through the jaws.

Unbound from its cage, backbone is
Hunks of muscle over unsure bone.
I laugh, and sweat, and chew, and chew
It all -- all dead of me --
Bittersweet carrion chewed into food.

Last comes the mask I called my face.
Say 'bye to those that raised you, painted on
The smiling, and tied you with pink ribbons here.
I could eat stone. Nasal cartilage
Is lettuce. This last shell of a skull
Is tough, but splits to double scoops
Of gray camembert, rotting mess of thoughts,
Undigested people in mid-fight,
Souring symbols, residue of 28 years'
Swallowing a world. Cherry-pits
And fur and skull all go through the jaws.
Eyeballs are delicate as peeled grapes.
Shells built around them crunch like ice --
Other people's prisons frozen on my sight.

Darkness comes as I grind up the mirrors.
I have eaten my dead.
I have out-mocked the echoes.

I watch a seed underground
Turn dirt and shit and rot into tree.
I will grow new eyes.
I will turn all of me into me.

-- Gerald Grow, June 1970