And So I’ve Awoken… Michael McCulloh

And so I’ve awoken
With a sulfur taste

Of an afternoon
After one hour’s sleep

Drilled down to ten,
Ten thousand…hours

And the arrival
Then completed

All departure.

For I was not slapped back
Into the same manchild,

And I believe
I, he… truly died then

In a desolate moment,

Abandoning all that had then
Forsaken him

And diving into all that remains
When the world is truly gone,

Severing as sure
As birds from eggs

All visceral slimes
And cords of connection:

Yes, this joy of flight
Is the core of all prison breaks,

But I mother you with
No regurgitations of Christ,

And the term “forsaken”
Is not cribbed from Jesus:

This egg/flight prison chisel
Is a handy tool

For anyone all-contained
Or all-removed

And is much described
In many forms…

And so I’ve awoken
With the sulfur taste

Several times
In automobiles

Which were my sleeping quarters,

Sometimes on a long journey,
Under the pressures of haste,

At others by utter necessity
In large cities, randomly parked

Or under that first
Wind-spoken,

Branch, leaf and
Scent speaking

Eucalyptus tree

Where stopping
Insisted like a magnet.

I’ve awoken so
On beaches:

When love is gone
Or seems gone

By the abandonment
Of either party,

I have found that beaches
Are often the dying

And the waking place,

However the getting there
Is accomplished:

You could be in Nebraska,

But you’d still find
That beach to die on

And wake up different.

I would not recommend
Traveling to escape

As an overt means
For such self-annihilation

As a practical matter,

Until, of course,

All the hotels are booked,
Or you are penniless

Or lost on night-trams

Far from your own mental maps
And beyond the conceivable

Memory of friends,

And thus you have driven, or ridden
To final exhaustion

And awake by the roadway,

Down the mountain slope

Or on the church-bitten rocks
Of north-eastern Spain,

Which,
Like the plummeting Big Sur,

Or the weedsnaking
Quartz-graveled North shore

Of the South Fork
Of Long Island,

Or the black-phantomed
Sands of San Torini,

You can be sure,

Will have preserved
No imprint of… me

To disturb your dying.