Memories That Do Me No Good

*Winner of the Jan-Feb 2011 Round of the now defunct Inspirations poetry contest.*

I feel a sadistic, snarling tharrump
against the cavernous, empty spaces of
my rib-caged prison. And I contemplate
memories that do me no good.
Dangerous meditation on
the time I swapped hearts
with a heartless man.

An Arthur Miller salesman,
dead or dying, a two-bit con,
he was a dead-souled Adonis.
A silken-voiced
weaver of love and lust;
sweet subterfuge of the soul.

The delicious sin, the tantalizing
rapture of delight ran through
me. Addicting, enslaving,
I sank into molasses-thick
communion with my own abasement.
I delighted in our empty-branched love,
and inconsequential lust.

And in the midst of wicked delight,
I felt suddenly a cavernous emptiness,
a maelstrom of arctic nothing.
Where once my beating soul had
spelled out my hopes and dreams,
there was a diseased mass of
atrium and ventricle, accomplishing
naught but blood flow and scant survival.

I searched for that thief of me,
but he was gone, oozing into the
cracks of detrimental memory.
And so I remain here, stuck in
this pitiless limbo; waiting, hoping,
praying on my imperfect sinner’s
knees that I might someday find
a man who’s souled enough for me.